Episode 386 - The Siege of Przemyśl

Speaker 1 Hey everyone, it's Joe. If you like what we do here on the show, consider supporting us on Patreon.

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Speaker 1 Hello and welcome to the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe and with me is Nate and we'd like to introduce to you our new restaurant, Trench Times.

Speaker 1 All of the fun of your favorite medieval times combined with the joys of the Western front of World War I.

Speaker 1 Our Sergeant Wait staff will yell at you from the moment you come into our establishment as they lead you to your seats in one of six trench seating areas, while our cracked acting staff fire machine guns over your head.

Speaker 1 From there, you'll be sprayed with a fine mixture of mud and human shit to really set the mood as our kitchen staff get to work cooking your meal, which will be on schedule.

Speaker 1 And by that I mean several days late with the doors barred and begin firing real live artillery shells directly at you. Nate, how are you doing today? Man, Mission Barbecue is falling the fuck off.

Speaker 1 It was weird enough with all the like star-spangled banner and saying the Pledge of Allegiance shit, but now it's just like, now it's a biohazard. Now they're giving me shell shock.

Speaker 1 Now I've got neurasthenia, combat fatigue, soldier's heart.

Speaker 1 I've got all these different diseases for ways they want to kind of like, I don't know, medicalize and pathologize the fact that like it kind of sucks thinking you're going to die and being really confirmed in the fact that it's a risk for a very long time.

Speaker 1 The hardest part is when you ask for mustard and they just, you start hearing metal on metal banging down the line. Oh, fuck, fuck.
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 Ask for mustard and they're like, well, we don't have any, we don't have any mustard paste, but there's this gas that'll really make things smell great in here. It's very spicy.

Speaker 1 You only smell it once. They never have to put urinal cakes in the toilets either.
Everybody's just emptying their bowels directly into their pants.

Speaker 1 Well, I was thinking more they're like, well, the chlorine gas, it winds up getting in there.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Everything is very clean. And by that, I mean, it's the only restaurant you go to that isn't, I don't know, if you're in Michigan, it's certainly like the local Coney Island.

Speaker 1 That's going to give you some horrific bacterial infection. And you know, going into it what you're going to get.
You know, we've invented this sit-down. theatrical version of Taco Bell.

Speaker 1 I remember these kinds of restaurants like your, I mean, I don't really recall that Sizzler was a place you'd get sick at, but like Ponderosa, you might be taking your life in your hand, sort of budget version of Ponderosa, even worse.

Speaker 1 And so it's like thinking about that extended metaphor that if you offered a Ponderosa buffet to a bunch of guys from the Somme, they wouldn't get sick. No.

Speaker 1 They think it was the greatest thing in the world. They already have the foundational level of like gut bacteria to power right through that.

Speaker 1 I remember there was a Ponderosa near where I lived growing up, but we never went to it because it was too expensive.

Speaker 1 I'm realizing now just how poor we were. Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's weird, right?

Speaker 1 Because on one hand, you can definitely eat your fill and then somewhere there's like a cash price for like all you can eat.

Speaker 1 But on the other hand, it's like sometimes the cash up front was like nine bucks or 12 bucks per person.

Speaker 1 And it's like, that's, yeah, if you're, if you're, if you're broke, like, that's, I can recall being broke enough where I'm like, do I, I'm going to ride my bike to the grocery store across the highway like a crackhead because I don't want to use up any gas

Speaker 1 that I might need to get to actual work work. And so, yeah, you take that over, extend it, multiply it, it gets a lot worse.
I have to regrettably admit this is kind of making me hungry.

Speaker 1 There are no ponderosas in fucking goddamn Switzerland. There are Mongolian barbecue places, but they're actually run by Mongolians.
It's not just like the fucking cheap food shit.

Speaker 1 I was trying to think of it. There's actual Mongolian food rather than like shitty stir-fry.
Yeah, there's, I mean, here's the thing, right? I was confused.

Speaker 1 I'm like, oh, it's like Plumington, Indiana, except I'm in, like, I don't know, Cornovan in geneva but then all of the writing is in mongolian with like mongolian flag stuff and it actually looks like the real deal and they also have some definitely not mongolian barbecue things like the great big dumplings and stuff that looks like it's made out of fermented some kind of dairy like so yeah when i saw it i was like oh no it's an actual mongolian restaurant okay after the recording nathan and go get turnt up on fermented mare's milk

Speaker 1 going to a kirgis restaurant and coming back with like six falcons on my shoulders

Speaker 1 this podcast only just throat singing now yeah exactly. Come and bring them home.
You're like, my daughter loves animals and she loves pointing out the names of animals.

Speaker 1 It's like, we're going to learn about falcons today, baby. Falcons one through six.
You get to name them. Yeah, exactly.
Give them all names. Give them all names.

Speaker 1 And it's like, she loves making the owl sound. You make an owl sound for a falcon.
They'd be like, where's this animal I can kill? They get all excited thinking they're going to get an eaten owl.

Speaker 1 Nate's going to have to take a prolonged absence from the podcast to his child be the victim of a falcon attack.

Speaker 1 Yeah, taking an absence for the, because I have to find, I still have the homing beacons. I have to find the falcons that picked up my daughter as a team and flew away.

Speaker 1 So today we're going to do something we haven't done in a really long time, Nate, and that's go back to the trenches, to the mountains, to the knee-deep horrors of World War I, but not to a place like Verdun or the Argonne, Ypres or Passchendel.

Speaker 1 Instead, we're going to talk about something that we'll say World War I heads don't necessarily really focus on. And I kind of include ourselves in that because we're guilty of this to some extent.

Speaker 1 And we're going to talk about not only a siege, but one of the longest sieges in Europe during World War I on the Eastern Front.

Speaker 1 We've talked about the Eastern Front before. We've done a whole series about the Battle of Tannenberg.

Speaker 1 But today we're going to talk about a Titanic struggle between two of the most institutionally fucked up militaries that took part in the war, Russia and Austro-Hungary. Yes.

Speaker 1 Everyone gets to take a little note here and say, Joe said a country was worse than the Ottoman Empire during World War I. I admit, I understand that that is strange coming from me.

Speaker 1 Everybody put one on the scoreboard.

Speaker 1 Now, we don't need to go over the start of World War I again, but what I do need to do is go into just how the Eastern Front opened up a little bit, and that's with a rapid Russian advance, probably as many successes as they would have during the entire war, not named the Brusilov Offensive.

Speaker 1 The Russian Imperial Army advance into German Eastern Prussia, which went pretty well until it didn't, owing to the fact that the German Imperial Army was, unfortunately for the world, quite good once it got the ball rolling.

Speaker 1 But they also invaded Galicia, then under the control of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which went much better, owing to the fact that Austria-Hungary was quite possibly the sickest man of sick men in Europe that tends to get a pass when people talk about that concept because they aren't Muslims or Turks, quite honestly.

Speaker 1 Like the Austro-Hungary is easily the most dysfunctional empire of World War I. They don't get that label, the sick sick man of Europe, that's always given famously to the Ottomans.

Speaker 1 Unfair, in my opinion, but

Speaker 1 the 1914 to 1918 heads out there will know this already, but just because of the fact that it's a term, it's an expression to describe a region that isn't really used outside of like regional nationalisms now, Galicia is what is now eastern Ukraine.

Speaker 1 So like Lviv.

Speaker 1 It can be confusing because there's also a part of Spain called Galicia. However.
It's also sometimes called Austrian Poland, which is fun.

Speaker 1 Yeah, because I remember the friend of mine did peacekeeping in Kosovo, and one of the contingents they worked with were, they were Ukrainian, part of the Ukrainian military, but they were all ethnic Poles from Ukraine, from really far eastern Ukraine.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, that just in case you were wondering, how did the Eastern Front get into Spain? No, it's a different Galicia.

Speaker 1 So, effectively, like, when you think about, we know a lot about Ukraine now, just for a variety of reasons. If you think about, yeah, Lviv, that's Galicia.

Speaker 1 If you think about the Donbass, that's a different part of Ukraine.

Speaker 1 And most of the soldiers at play under the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary that we're going to talk about today, conscript-wise, are almost universally Ukrainian.

Speaker 1 But we'll get to that in a bit and why this causes a lot of issues. Mostly because those issues are baked in to the very concept of Austria-Hungary.
The war starts off pretty horribly for them.

Speaker 1 And that's thanks to several things.

Speaker 1 And to save a lot of us time, we're going to streamline that a little bit to underline some major institutional issues that Austria-Hungary was undergoing and just always had.

Speaker 1 That very label of a dual monarchy itself is a good way to explain why Austria-Hungary was collapsing in on itself. Legally, it was a union and an alliance as well as a sovereign nation.

Speaker 1 It was supposed to be a single functioning country. But in reality, it was kind of three countries in one.
By definition, it was not supposed to to be split into three.

Speaker 1 The easiest way to kind of understand this is, what if American federalism was even dumber? And so you have the Austrian Empire, you have the Kingdom of Hungary.

Speaker 1 After 1867, they're considered co-equals within the union. So it's not like, say, the United Kingdom, another union that still exists to this day.
Every part of this union is supposed to be equal.

Speaker 1 and legally equal. They both had heads of state, they both had parliaments, ministries, and and their own armies joined together by a single unifying emperor.

Speaker 1 And for a time, people actually liked this emperor, but he was old and dying at this point. And people were kind of quite sure the empire was going to die with him.

Speaker 1 A lot of political parties were certainly pulling at the strings.

Speaker 1 This is, of course, a time when minority-based nationalism was coming very much to the fore, hence why World War I started in the first place. Yep.

Speaker 1 However, there were also imperial offices doing the same thing as the Austrian and Hungarian offices were doing. Like I said, turbo-brain-damaged federalism, but with kings.

Speaker 1 So that means at any given time, there are three government offices doing the same job, only slightly differently. And this could be considered like a form of like a devolution of powers if it worked.

Speaker 1 But instead of ever really working together, these three branches of the Austro-Hungarian government body always just kind of fought one another.

Speaker 1 This kind of reminds me of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, where like their government structure was such that it lent itself to just being constantly deadlocked and not really able to accomplish anything.

Speaker 1 So it's like not to say, oh, well, other thing in vaguely Eastern Europe. And so therefore, you know,

Speaker 1 it must be something in the water, but it's just more like when you start to get into these kind of weird national republics, constitutional monarchies, government structures established post-19th century or in the 19th century, especially the ones that are like holding out into the 20th century, you start to see some, because it was all based on elite domination, subservience of all ethnic minorities, and like an aristocratic culture that like didn't really have to attend to any notion of like, maybe the people who, you know, farm dirt for a living might also want to say.

Speaker 1 You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 And not to say this was like this, this massive, massively egalitarian thing that was happening in 1914, 1918, but more along the lines of like, you can see how it didn't keep pace with other developments elsewhere.

Speaker 1 It rapidly died because it was an anachronism trying to tamp down on all these new political ideas.

Speaker 1 I mean, kind of pointing at something that still exists today that by definition and by law is absolutely never going to work, is like the Lebanese government for a lot of the same reasons.

Speaker 1 I mean, you could go further than that, and you could go and be like, oh, you mean a thing that was a construct of weird 18th and 19th century liberalism that envisions a kind of like comedy comedy between equal parties and the complete disenfranchisement of anyone who isn't already elite.

Speaker 1 And somehow it's inherently unstable. You mean the country we're from, the United States of America.
Yep. Weird how that works.

Speaker 1 We're definitely stomping on the gas towards becoming Austro-Hungary, but dumber because it was built by all the like dirt farmers and elites like great-great-great-grandchildren.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. It's just like, I don't know.

Speaker 1 As I've said before, without derailing too much, if you take the absolute most reductive, vulgar Marxist explanation of the United States as a country founded on infinite profit from slavery and infinite free land from genocide, you're not that far off.

Speaker 1 Like there's some nuance required, but you're not that far.

Speaker 1 You're far closer to the truth than if you were to be like, you know, the shit that we learned in school and the way in which it's kind of taught us like, wow, it's just, you know, more perfect and union and great.

Speaker 1 Everything is attended to and all these checks and balances that were great.

Speaker 1 It's like, yeah, and that's why strong federal bicameral republics are doing well all over the new world, all over Latin America. They do really well, right?

Speaker 1 That's why you take the American project, right? And you just stuff it with goulash and like, I don't know, Austrian food, a sausage. That's Austro-Hungary.
Take it away, America.

Speaker 1 Put it back on top, Austro-Hungary. And then it's like, well, you already have the concept of beating the piece of meat till it's flat and then cooking it in America.

Speaker 1 You just, you take away the breaded part and you just have burger. And so it's like, what is America but schnitzel minus the bread?

Speaker 1 And also made out of beef instead of pork, but you know, variety exists there. The key American point here I'm learning is beat the meat flat.

Speaker 1 Beat the meat flat, get a mallet, and beat the meat like nobody's fucking business. Get that shit like Mario and Donkey Kong, hammer the fuck out of it, get it as flat as it possibly can be.

Speaker 1 And then, I mean, if you squint or you hit yourself in the head really hard, a schnitzel with spatz like kind of looks like a burger fry. That's true.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So that means like at any given time, there is three different budgets, three different governments bitching bitching about who got what over what.

Speaker 1 And as you can imagine, for people, depending on what country you live in right now and are listening to this, this system doesn't really work as it should, either locally or nationally.

Speaker 1 The country was also quite large, second only to Russia in land mass and third in population after Germany and Russia.

Speaker 1 Within that population, there are multiple different nationalities, languages, religions, and ethnicities, all of which caused constant tension because they did not necessarily want to be part of this national body.

Speaker 1 My dad happened to work with a guy when he was a staff officer who was like the highest ranking Hungarian American to serve in the U.S. military.
It was a guy named Huba Vaseshega.

Speaker 1 And like he was technically speaking Romanian, but he was a Romanian-Hungarian because there's a large Hungarian minority in northern Romania.

Speaker 1 And it's like those people were all part of Greater Austro-Hungary. And then suddenly they weren't at a certain point.
And then much like elsewhere in the world, borders get drawn.

Speaker 1 It's just sort of like, wait, wait, what the fuck?

Speaker 1 But that what the fuckness wasn't absent when they're what they weren't, you know, Romanian citizens or Romanian citizens or whatever, however you want to draw it.

Speaker 1 Like, I think that disconnect between, first of all, the dysfunctional government and also like the disconnect between that like very elite driven and elite-centric system of government that doesn't really treat any of those concerns like they matter.

Speaker 1 Yep. I'm surprised.
Once you get to a certain level, like, oh, you know, we would translate this into whatever language you speak, but we just don't give a fuck about you. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Mr.

Speaker 1 Smith goes to Graz and gets shot.

Speaker 1 For example, by World War I, there were nine different nationally recognized languages and several more that weren't. Now, this is not an issue.

Speaker 1 This is not me saying that having a diverse country is a problem. I'm not becoming like, I don't know, a Republican.

Speaker 1 However, what is important is when you have multiple different ethnicities and languages and cultures within your borders, you do generally need a system in place where they all can work and live together, right?

Speaker 1 It's, I have a relevant example.

Speaker 1 They got rid of a law here in Switzerland that they used to exist, that stuff needed to be in at least, I think it needed to be at least two official languages of Switzerland.

Speaker 1 It may have been three in some cases, but I think it was two. And this country is 75% German speaking.

Speaker 1 So like, you'll find this happening now where, like, this happens to me when I've been, when I was ordering stuff for setting up internet things and some parts and some music things, some tools, especially.

Speaker 1 I do speak German. But like, most people who grow up, live and born and raised in the French-speaking part of this country don't speak German.
And why would they need to?

Speaker 1 And these sites don't have English either.

Speaker 1 All of a sudden, it's like it's gone away. And like, they've stopped doing some of the bilingual or like oftentimes trilingual marking on things.

Speaker 1 And so now it's like, right, but like that actually becomes kind of a problem because if you don't speak German, how the fuck are you going to like, I mean, you have Google Translate, but imagine extrapolate that to all the things where Google Translate doesn't apply.

Speaker 1 Or like, you know, it's 100 years ago where if you don't know how to speak something, you're just fucked. And also people didn't read back then.
A lot of them didn't.

Speaker 1 And so it's like, yeah, it's wild to see it because this is an insanely developed country with insanely like strong systems. And yet you see it.

Speaker 1 So you can only imagine in a place as like dysfunctional as Austria-Hungary. Absolutely nothing could help you if you didn't speak a language.
Obviously, some people were bi or trilingual.

Speaker 1 Not everybody was.

Speaker 1 The government offices also, depending on where you live, if you say we're in Galicia, you speak Ukrainian, which is kind of intelligible with Russian, but your local offices don't have any paperwork or any Ukrainian speakers.

Speaker 1 Good luck getting anything done. This is legitimately what happens in Switzerland with Swiss Italians because Italian is an official language of this country.

Speaker 1 But if you're like requesting accommodation for like stuff in Italian, they're just hanging up the fucking phone on you. Like they don't.
It doesn't happen. Like they don't.

Speaker 1 And it's, I mean, God help you if you need the fourth language, Romanche, which basically no one speaks outside of like this mountain region.

Speaker 1 Like genuinely, it's so funny that you'd say this because like this is a problem now.

Speaker 1 So you said nine official languages.

Speaker 1 Nine, but there's really only two to three that are nationally important and that is german hungarian and czech yeah that those are the elite languages of the empire with german and and czech being the major two dominant ones and if you are anybody outside those three you're gonna have a rough time which is why of course some people learned other languages but most people didn't because most people live quite locally and it leads to a lot of political parties being started of like, hey, what about us?

Speaker 1 Effectively, you know, minority-based nationalism, which is the only good nationalism.

Speaker 1 You know, people struggling for representation, for fair treatment, for laws.

Speaker 1 And technically, there were laws, which we'll get into in a little bit, that said that depending on a population center and their demographics, those government offices would have to serve them and know their languages, or at least have translators available.

Speaker 1 But in reality, it never worked out that way. Because again, this is a barely functioning triple-headed monster of bureaucratic nightmares.

Speaker 1 And this permeated every step of life within the empire, including in the context of this episode, the military. Remember, there are three different governments within the Austro-Hungary Empire.

Speaker 1 All three have their own armies. All of them are responsible for training, equipping, and supplying themselves.

Speaker 1 apart from you know the main government the imperial government and you know their own regional ministries of defense to manage those personnel.

Speaker 1 Though hypothetically, the imperial military, that the one being under the unified emperor, was supposed to be the main army.

Speaker 1 This is sometimes known as the common army, with the other two acting as a kind of reserve. However, those other two regions, that being Austria and Hungary, did not see things that way.

Speaker 1 Instead, they saw those as their armies. After all, they have their own monarchs.
They have their own national bodies. This is our army.

Speaker 1 So, through political pride, national pride, they absolutely did not see these people as reserves. They saw them as the standing army.
I'm just laughing because now it's making me think that, like,

Speaker 1 the good soldier's fake, like, what is it? Yaroslav Haszek or Franz Kafka or Stefan Zweig were actually just writing like cottage core cozy novels about what life was like.

Speaker 1 They're doing the idealized fun version of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was way worse.
They were doing like fucking like cozy talk content.

Speaker 1 I love the idea of Franz Kafka cottage core.

Speaker 1 Franz Kaufker writing a story about a teenage witch trying to find her cat.

Speaker 1 And then she turns to a huge fucking buck.

Speaker 1 Man, man, that sounds so. I mean, it does explain a lot having read some of these authors.
Like, it does explain.

Speaker 1 It's definitely a time, like, this is the era of huge political instability as World War I starts for Austro-Hungary famously. And we all know why it started.

Speaker 1 A guy got stuck in traffic. Yeah, guy got stuck in traffic.
Yeah, a guy did Bosnian falling down, and basically the rest happened.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 it would probably make sense to you if you're like Austro-Hungary probably wanted to stay out of this war, but in reality, they were one of the main instigators of it, mostly in the form of the chief of the general staff, Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf, which we've done a series on.

Speaker 1 He's a real fucking moron. He had been actually arguing for an Austro-Hungarian invasion of Serbia for years by the time World War I started.

Speaker 1 He is one of the main reasons why World War I starts at all.

Speaker 1 He leads his army into the field, gets his teeth kicked in at virtually every turn. And in these early stages, he loses Galicia.

Speaker 1 The entire front line collapses over 100 kilometers into the Carpathian Mountains, leaving only the fortress city of Primisil still standing.

Speaker 1 I'm using the general German pronunciation here because I cannot read Polish.

Speaker 1 There's way too many Y's and Z's for that to escape my mouth.

Speaker 1 I understand there's like six different pronunciations for this one place. I'm using the one I can manage it the best.
So bear with me.

Speaker 1 I mean, all I can say is that I, in what feels like a different life, was pretty diligent about doing Duolingo for Russian and didn't actually learn any Russian, but I did get a lot of practice with the Cyrillic alphabet as it's used in Russian.

Speaker 1 And I remember when Duolingo in like 2015, 2016 added some other languages, Polish was one of them. And I remember being like, what on earth?

Speaker 1 I feel like Polish is one of those languages like Icelandic that they're like, no, the reason why we always learn another language is because we can't expect you to learn this.

Speaker 1 Well, I guess that's the thing, right?

Speaker 1 Is that for me, it was like, because I had the experience with Russian, There are a lot of words in Polish that are very similar, if not the exact same, I'm just pronounced with Polish pronunciation.

Speaker 1 But you also start to understand why the Cyrillic alphabet exists, because in Polish, they're represented by four consonants jammed together when it's one letter in Russian.

Speaker 1 I'm not saying Polish should use the Cyrillic alpha. I understand that.
Mate, come out in favor of the Russian imperial principles. Exactly, exactly.
I want to Russify Poland. I'm sorry.

Speaker 1 Kaliningrad should just expand outward. It should just take over Poland.
You know,

Speaker 1 I don't know enough about it. Without banned from Poland, I think.
Exactly, which sucks.

Speaker 1 I mean, Polish people and American people have a great big handshake between like every basically every Polish person I've met who's left Poland or has lived abroad is like cool and also knows their government fucking sucks shit.

Speaker 1 And that's most Americans who end up living abroad, maybe not traveling or studying abroad. And

Speaker 1 also it's like Polish people are probably like, wow, American podcasts, they have to talk in circles so that they can change a light bulb. So they probably think that we're dumb as well.

Speaker 1 Polish and Americans shaking hands over a pile of mashed potatoes and racism. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 Polish and Americans shaking hands so they can connect between two ladders and using their other hands to hold the light bulb while a bunch of people spin them around. That's right.

Speaker 1 And then they can change it. Yeah, exactly.
I don't know why the light bulb jokes are so funny. I think it's because it's such a stupid fucking thing to say.
It's like, it makes no sense.

Speaker 1 And so why Americans in like the 70s thought this was hilarious, I have no idea. But it's just, I don't, we don't think Polish people are dumb.
We like Polish people. We have great Polish fans.

Speaker 1 But it's just like, of all the things, it's just so, because it's so stupid, I can't help making the joke.

Speaker 1 I have a feeling I'm going to go back to Michigan, which has a very large Polish population near where my mother lives, And I'm going to get beaten in the street by a sack full of pierogi now.

Speaker 1 Oh, because I say Polish people, we're nice. They're like, no, we're not.
Fuck you. We're miserable, you fuck.
We hate ourselves. We hate everyone else.
That's why America is idealized Poland.

Speaker 1 I mean, to be fair, I know a lot of people who have moved from the Caucasus, Armenia, and Georgia, and ended up in Poland.

Speaker 1 And universally, their experience has been terrible because Polish people are racist as fuck towards them.

Speaker 1 All I can say is that I remember a Polish Afghan cooperation mug in our government compound that the Polish army had given. And it was like the Polish flag with a hand reaching out and the Afghan

Speaker 1 flag with a hand reaching out and shaking a handshake. And let's just say the colorist who designed this was like, I want to be as racist as possible.

Speaker 1 The fortress began construction in the mid-1800s as a result of the Crimean War, which, fun fact, we'll be talking a little about next week.

Speaker 1 But it was meant to be a monster of a fortress, a complex around the city in the mountains with nearly 50 different reinforced lines and bunkers.

Speaker 1 And then, with not even about a half of a bit of construction done, they stopped. This is mostly due to Austria-Hungary being completely broke and relations with Russia getting slightly better.

Speaker 1 Then the Balkans began to blow up a few decades later, and construction began once again.

Speaker 1 By the time World War I kicked off, it still was not done, but it was the best forward position the Empire held.

Speaker 1 After nearly 30 years of on-again, off-again construction, had it 17 main forts and 18 18 other supporting positions with trench lines leading to each one as kind of an in-between measure.

Speaker 1 And all of that was reinforced around there with a half a million miles of barbed wire. That is otherwise known as a fuckload of barbed wire.

Speaker 1 That's a lot of barbed wire.

Speaker 1 It feels like there's a number of small countries in Europe, maybe even medium-sized countries in Europe, where you could just do a single-strand barbed wire fence around the whole country with that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I live in one. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But you have to barbed wire the ocean, though, which don't worry, Hurt Wilders is working on that. Yeah,

Speaker 1 he is. Actually, by the time this episode comes out, we will know how badly those elections went and if I am being deported, probably.

Speaker 1 With that being said, virtually all of the construction done previously was horribly out of date.

Speaker 1 This was unreinforced concrete, for example, and gun positions built for guns that were 40 years too old.

Speaker 1 This is not exactly the position you want to be in in, say, 1914-15 and taking shots with a modern piece of artillery, for example. It had nearly a thousand fortress guns, which is a ton, admittedly.

Speaker 1 Even out-of-date guns, if you have a thousand of them, can do some damage. But outside of about 30, they were very old.

Speaker 1 They had about 30 what you consider modern guns at the beginning of World War I in this fort. So then you have, you know, 990 or however many leftovers from the last war against the Turks or whatever.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, on one hand, it's like, even if the gun looks stupid as hell, it still sucks to get shot with it. Yeah, if you have a thousand of something.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's like the, you know, North Korea has like all the World War II and, you know, Korean War vintage artillery pieces, but there's like a million of them.

Speaker 1 It's like, presuming that, like, let's say 50% of them can fire, that's still kind of a problem if you're like... Seoul? Yeah, Seoul.
Yeah, anywhere on the border.

Speaker 1 If you're in the risk-estimated distance of those things, it's, you know. Sort of like, it might be a goofy ass Wes Anderson gun, but then it kills you.
That's not great. Look at it this way.

Speaker 1 If you get jumped outside of a bank or or whatever, and a guy pulls out like a tally-ho single-shot pistol, he can still rob you. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 If LeFou and Gaston run you for your shoes with a blunderbuss, it will still hurt and potentially kill you if you get shot with it. Gaston and fucking

Speaker 1 Black Forces robbing you with a single shot pistol. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 Gaston needs that money to get his car hearts tailored to fit his huge ass shoulders.

Speaker 1 No, Gaston needs to run you his money because eggs are so goddamn expensive in America now and he eats five dozen of them a day. That's like a crack habit.

Speaker 1 That's like being hooked on fucking real Percocettes.

Speaker 1 Unlike J.D. Vance, his mom did not sell him for.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he has a problem.

Speaker 1 Gaston, unfortunately,

Speaker 1 has never been able to figure out whether or not he wants to marry LeFou and adopt or is actually heterosexual. And so because he doesn't have kids, he can't sell them for perks like J.D.
Vance's mom.

Speaker 1 Oh, you know, I hope one day Gaston can figure that out for himself. He needs to listen to this podcast.
He needs to find better masculinity.

Speaker 1 General Hermann Kuzmanik was put in command of this fortress city when the war started. And to his credit, he saw the fort was pretty doomed should it become a frontline position.

Speaker 1 So he put his garrison of 27,000 men to work trying to reinforce it the best he could, while, of course, asking for as many reinforcements as any of the three governments within his country could give him.

Speaker 1 He was eventually set 100,000 extra soldiers. But the soldiers he got were, let's say, the perfect representation of all the problems of this empire.

Speaker 1 These soldiers came from every corner of Austro-Hungary, but were drawn from something known as the Landsturm.

Speaker 1 Just to circle back here, because I know I talked about three different armies already in this country: that is the Austrian Landwehr, the Hungarian Honved, and the Common Army.

Speaker 1 Common army being the Imperial Army. However, then there's the Landsturm, which was the reserve of the reserve of those three armies.

Speaker 1 So like real, real professional soldier shit, real squared away, dressed right, dress. Oh, the best of the best.

Speaker 1 Extremely PT test passers is what we're talking about here. Yeah.
Yeah. Uh, this is the most jacked dudes Austro-Hunger had off.
I mean, the Arnold Schwarzenegger's great-great-grandfather in there.

Speaker 1 That's the only Austrian I can think of. I mean, the only ones I can think of besides him are dudes who are way worse politically, which is saying Adolf Hitler, Jurich Haider.
Like, there's not a ton.

Speaker 1 I mean, that is just, again, our guy Schwarzenegger's dad.

Speaker 1 What is it? The guy who runs the fucking,

Speaker 1 doesn't he own the Red Bull team, the fucking F1 team? There's another Austrian. I can't remember what his name is.

Speaker 1 Like, yeah, he's not, okay, he's not Hitler or Jurg Heider, but like, you know, I'm suspicious of any Austrian.

Speaker 1 Yeah. The Landsturm were men that the other three countries did not want.
They were between the ages of 37 and 41. So that's us.
We're in the Landschurman.

Speaker 1 Imagine you and me just rocking up and being like, hey, what up? We got, we're your relief force. Do you got anyone who can help with back pain?

Speaker 1 We walked all this way to tell you my fucking knees hurt. Uh, though many of them were closer to 40, they hadn't been in uniform because there was conscription as well.

Speaker 1 So they had done some military service previously, but for many of them, it was when they're, you know, 18 or 19 and they haven't put on a uniform in 30 years. I'm going to put it this way.

Speaker 1 You're in very good shape. I'm in decent shape for 41.
I do work. I run a lot, you know, but I can't do the shit we used to do.

Speaker 1 Not that I couldn't keep up if I, you know, did a little bit of practice. It's just you don't recover.
You don't recover at all. Everything hurts for way longer than

Speaker 1 way longer. And it's like you're expected to just get up and do it again that afternoon or the next morning.

Speaker 1 And it's like, especially when you're dealing with combat stuff or like the just, you know, defense stuff they're talking about, like setting up a static defense.

Speaker 1 It's like 99% fucking manual backbreaking labor, digging, pouring concrete. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
Somebody be like, God, I wish they'd invented sandbags. That sucks.
And sandbags are bad too. Like, it's, yeah.

Speaker 1 So I just think about that, that, like, even if people are, you reckon that in these days, given the way the economy was arranged, a lot of these people probably do some kind of manual labor, and they're not necessarily going to be, they're not going to be like, you know, uh, email job people in terms of like how active their lifestyle is.

Speaker 1 Terrier pigeon job. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Really passive-aggressive telegram jobs.

Speaker 1 As per my last beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. That was another thing I was going to point out.

Speaker 1 Most of these dudes, because of the way the Austro-Hungarian Empire worked in general, these Landsgerm men were peasants by the imperial standard, which meant they were working farm labor jobs and construction.

Speaker 1 They were aged beyond their years, like we are in a way. And granted, our lives have been significantly easier.
Yes.

Speaker 1 And in the time that they have beaten up their bodies between previous military service, which was very, very rough because it's mostly abuse-based. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And then years upon years of manual labor, people have called them old beyond their years. And Oren Kuzmanik's word, quote, well past their prime fatties.

Speaker 1 I would definitely say to me, it's like, on one hand, it's not they're going to be unable to do physical work.

Speaker 1 It's that they're probably going to be dealing with a lot of repetitive stress injuries, stuff like fucked up teeth, badly healed, broken bones.

Speaker 1 And general, like their recovery is not going to be anywhere near. Like, this is not a group of people who's going to be able to flex fast to do something.
You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 There's always going to be one guy in every platoon with a weird limp. You can't quite place why.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Oh, that's Pietor. He had his fucking leg eaten by a farm machine.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry, sorry.

Speaker 1 That's Yannick. He's actually got like a phantom twin on the bottom of his foot, and he has entire life.
So one leg is literally longer than the other because there's a phantom twin there.

Speaker 1 Every time he steps on it, we can hear its mouth go. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, exactly. It's kind of like a foot whoopee cushion, and it's just his calcified twin sibling going,

Speaker 1 and legally, that means you actually have to give him two different salaries.

Speaker 1 Exactly. Because the phantom twin meets the enlistment requirements of the landfill.

Speaker 1 That would suck so bad to be Yannick, and then your phantom twin and your foot got picked up for fucking fire guard right after you, and you have to do two shifts in a row because you can't be sleeping while the twin,

Speaker 1 the awesome, is sitting on the ground as the feet are dragging you around.

Speaker 1 Fuck, dude, my shift ended two hours ago. And because it's the Austro-Hungarian Empire, you speak German, but your foot speaks Czech.

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 1 That brings us to the language problems between the soldiers, not just the Phantom Twins.

Speaker 1 The vast majority of the language terms sent specifically to Premisile Fortress is Polish or Ukrainian with a loose understanding of German or Czech, but not nearly enough to say they're conversational or anything like that.

Speaker 1 Others still had zero understanding of the basics of any language we've named so far. So there's like, you know, four out of every five speak Polish or Ukrainian.

Speaker 1 But then the fifth guy is like, I don't know, some weird regional dialect speaker that can't understand any of them.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, and there's a lot, there's a lot of minority languages in this part of the world. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Even places that now are like countries that are now nation states and have national languages, like, you know, even within those places, there are significant dialects.

Speaker 1 And you think about like how think about the variety of weird accents in a country like the United Kingdom, which was around for a very long time speaking that language or some form of that language before like mass communication and standardization and like you know centralized government in a significant way and think about how what wild offshoots of of accents you have and dialects you have and it's like imagine what i mean if there are recordings of german germans who were who or brits who were taken pow

Speaker 1 in the first world war where they were made to record things to help the German army like train spies and their accents are like, they don't exist anymore. They're complete, like that level.

Speaker 1 And it's like, imagine that, but then you have nine official languages in this notional entity that is represented by the three governments.

Speaker 1 And it's like, yeah, I bet you there's a lot of people who can't fucking talk.

Speaker 1 Like, sometimes when I call somebody up on the phone and they're in Scotland, I can't understand a fucking word they're saying. So it's like, yep, we recently had that experience at their live show.

Speaker 1 Scottish fans, we love you, but I can only understand about 50% of you. I actually do really well with Glaswich because shouts out to Ross Palethorpe, one of my best friends who's from there.

Speaker 1 And so by talking to him so much, I actually was okay. But man,

Speaker 1 my God, I can only imagine what it's like. And there's, there's weirder, and that's one language.

Speaker 1 So, what we're talking about here is like, it just feels as though it's, it's full on, like, oh, now I see why they put the bit about the Tower of Babel in the Bible. Got it.
Okay.

Speaker 1 The officer corps wasn't any better. Remember at the beginning of World War I, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was just like every other country.

Speaker 1 And by that, I mean its recruitment offices were flooded with young enlisted men and officers from every branch of every military looking for glory and adventure or go be home by Christmas type shit with one of the three armies.

Speaker 1 But these guys were not them. They had reserve commissions and purposefully did not do that.
They had home lives. They had jobs.
They had families. They had no want for military service.

Speaker 1 They had purchased or were given a commission years before as a kind of status symbol that existed in the empire. They did not want anything to do with this.
These men came from higher society.

Speaker 1 They spoke different languages of politically and socially dominant nationalities, that being German, Hungarian, or Czech, but mostly German and Czech, with none of them knowing any of the other languages.

Speaker 1 Military regulations stated at the time that military standard language was German.

Speaker 1 However, if more than one-fifth of a unit spoke a different language, the officer corps would have to learn that as well. This is a very loose rule.
It was never really enforced.

Speaker 1 And even in the standing armies of the, like, let's say the common army, the main imperial army, it was virtually impossible.

Speaker 1 And it was even worse in a place like the Landsturm where officers and men were just kind of surprised plucked from their daily lives and thrown back into military service. I would say two things.

Speaker 1 Number one, officers typically, as I understand it, in generally in European militaries at the time, you had to be literate, but that was obviously not entirely in for us all the time.

Speaker 1 If you're not literate, it's much more difficult to learn another language because your ability to study of it. I mean, people do it all the time.
People have done it since languages have existed.

Speaker 1 However, and think of where these conscripts are being drawn from, their own regions where they speak their language. Why the fuck would they learn that? Of course.

Speaker 1 And I would also say something else too that I just think is funny when you talk about buying a reserve commission as a status symbol and then this happens.

Speaker 1 It's like if you joined the Freemasons because it was a status symbol, it's like, oh shit, we're all getting activated into the final battle with the Dark Lord.

Speaker 1 Damn it. I just wanted to have the decal.
I just want to have a cool ring. Fuck.
Quit getting your tiny cars. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Isn't that the Shriners? Yeah, that's the same fucking idea. Oh, no.
They have to go to battle in a formation that looks like the cover of the Dead Kennedys album, Franken Christ.

Speaker 1 The phalanx of tiny Chryslers. According to Kuzmanik, by the time all of his men got put together, he had to publish his daily orders in 15 different languages every morning.

Speaker 1 For the listener, I'm making a face. I'm making a face of shock and dismay.
That's so many.

Speaker 1 And you can imagine how bad some of those translations were because some of those languages, nobody in the officer corps spoke so they had to find like an enlisted guy who's like yeah i speak like the third best german i'll translate it for you because he wants a cake job you know i would do that and so they translate it into this other language that they speak but they don't speak say german or czech that well so it's like as you get down into smaller and smaller languages the translations are worse and worse So you're just like a private sitting in the trench.

Speaker 1 Like, what are the daily orders? You unroll this fucking, I don't know, like like, tabola rasa of different languages, and you're just like, uh, rotate horse slowly in here.

Speaker 1 What the fuck does that mean? What does that even mean? It's like one formation. If guys were the private who was drafted to translate, really didn't want the job.

Speaker 1 You see all the people lined up in accordance with the commander's orders in one formation, all of them are completely naked, except they've all wedged a single potato on their dicks.

Speaker 1 And it's like, we're just following orders. Y'all are the ones who are fucked up right now.
We made a bed.

Speaker 1 It's like the red-hot chili peppers with the socks, but worse.

Speaker 1 It's

Speaker 1 Eastern European red-hot chili peppers, which means they're naked smeared in mayoed potatoes. Oh, oh.

Speaker 1 By September, the Austrian field armies in the area had retreated, and Kuzmanik watched them leave his fortress.

Speaker 1 He was given orders by Hotzendorf to hold the fort until the last man, and they would do their best to relieve him eventually.

Speaker 1 Kuzmanik assumed that the Russians would be right at their heels, but they actually weren't. The Russians didn't pull up until October, and they didn't have orders to attack the fortress.

Speaker 1 Instead, the Russian high command thought it was best to simply go around it and keep pushing the Austrian field armies. However, General Alexei Brasilov disagreed.

Speaker 1 He thought if he took the fortress, it would open the road wide open for an invasion of Hungary proper, not to mention secure vital railroads in the area.

Speaker 1 Brasilov also thought leaving an army of 130,000 men at his rear as he advanced is probably a bad idea, even if they were just a whole bunch of middle-aged dudes with back pain. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's like, sir, what's the garrison doing? The binoculars up to my

Speaker 1 guy is at a grill and and 98,000 of them are in a circle watching.

Speaker 1 What are they doing?

Speaker 1 They're constructing a more and more abstruse metaphor about the incomprehensibility of languages.

Speaker 1 They're translating shit back and forth like dumb Google Translate telephone game, but they're making dudes do it with printing presses. Someone's beating a messenger pigeon to death with a spatula.

Speaker 1 I think we should probably just leave them, sir. Yeah, yeah.
I feel like at this point, this is just their home now. They're just going to establish, they're going to establish the one true language.

Speaker 1 They're going to come out of the bottom of this section, how Esperanto was invented. Exactly.

Speaker 1 It's Esperanto, but it's really, really racist against Roma people. Well, yeah, just like Esperanto.
Is it? I don't know. I don't know that much about it.
I mean, I imagine.

Speaker 1 It's a language invented in Europe. I know this by default.
Yeah, fair enough. Yeah.
I mean, it's got spaked in, I guess.

Speaker 1 Since this is the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it can be Roma people or Bosnians or Serbians or just go down the line. Actually, somehow this will come up later.

Speaker 1 At this point, the fortress was already surrounded with something of a picketing force, but Brusilov commanded the 3rd and 8th armies, so he began to send those in to fully envelop the fortress city.

Speaker 1 He had the defenders badly outnumbered, and from an attacker's perspective, the area around the fortress actually was quite good. It had multiple high hills where guns and spotters could be deployed.

Speaker 1 There was even cover leading up to the fortress in the forms of like ruined villages, woods, and ravines, things that you think the Austro-Hungarians would have maybe done something about in the last 30 years to make attacking the fortress a little bit harder, but they didn't.

Speaker 1 There was even a supporting rail network pulled right up to Brusilev's armies, ensuring a constant supply line in the one case in all of World War I where the Russian military would not be wanting for resources.

Speaker 1 And Brusilev decided the best thing to do would be to attack the fortress's southwest, where a massive fort built in the mid-1800s was supported by another six that were much newer.

Speaker 1 And all of these were supported by further trench lines and barbed wire.

Speaker 1 As was standard Russian doctrine at the time, Brusilov would pound the southwest with artillery and then send an infantry forward to assault and take ground, but not, you know, small rifle teams or whatever.

Speaker 1 They were still operating under the general Napoleonic idea of taking the battlefield at bayonet point.

Speaker 1 And just to underline how badly out of date everything was, and Russia is not alone in this, but specifically in the context of Russia for our episode, the idea of hand grenades was still kept to grenadiers.

Speaker 1 And those are very small, elite units on top of larger armies.

Speaker 1 So despite this attack being, you know, tens of thousands of infantry, only 32 hand grenades were issued out to a grenadier detachment beforehand. But isn't it a massive clearing operation?

Speaker 1 Isn't it like breaching a defense? Yeah.

Speaker 1 But remember, they're operating under the concept of like early 1800s grenadiers.

Speaker 1 So, like, but even in a, you know, going off of, you know, we did a series on the French invasion of Napoleon's invasion of Russia, and he would have brought more grenadiers than this. Just laughing.

Speaker 1 It's like, yeah, they don't, we don't use grenades when we clear a static defense.

Speaker 1 We just shoot small arms, they shoot small arms, and everybody else is reloading and be like, no, no, stop. Put it down.
You're cheating. Shark.
Fucking heck. Bots.
Refs.

Speaker 1 Sir, you have have to scream that in one of 15 languages that we understand. Russian isn't one of them.

Speaker 1 Yeah, three of them, it's the correct one, and then the other 12, the privates, just taught you swear words and thought it was funny. Yep.

Speaker 1 On October 5th, 1914, the Russians began the bombardment of the southwest, with the assaulting force inching closer and closer.

Speaker 1 The artillery didn't do as much damage to the southwestern forts because they actually picked the worst way to attack Primusil.

Speaker 1 And that's because the southwestern forts were a group of the newer ones, so they could actually absorb the artillery better than some of the other ones.

Speaker 1 However, remember, these positions are largely being manned by middle-aged dudes who absolutely do not want to be there, commanded by other middle-aged dudes who absolutely do not want to be there.

Speaker 1 So the effects of a bombardment are striking, no pun intended. The effects of a sustained artillery bombardment are, let's say, hard to explain on the human mind.

Speaker 1 So to explain this to people who have never been under artillery bombardment, and I hope they never will, I always go back to describing this using a passage from Ernst Junger's book, Storm of Steel, where he says, quote, you must imagine you're secured to a post, being menaced by a man with swinging a heavy hammer.

Speaker 1 Now the hammer has been taken back above his head, ready to be swung.

Speaker 1 It's cleaving the air towards you, on the point of touching your skull, and then strikes the post next to you, showering you with splinters.

Speaker 1 He goes on to say whether the man hits you or not is not up to you at all. You can only sit there and wait for it, which is quite accurate from my personal experience.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, we got rocketed and mortared a a bit, but not like mega-severely.

Speaker 1 I remember having a car bomb go off not that far from us, and I didn't know sound could be that loud.

Speaker 1 A friend of mine got blown up in an MRAP, and I remember he described the sound as like you were taking a nap inside a metal garden shed and suddenly it got hit with a huge sledgehammer.

Speaker 1 Sounds about right.

Speaker 1 It's just the loudness, but in this case, it's not just one loud concussion, it's constant. Thousands.
Thousands.

Speaker 1 And it's like, this is a thing that's actually recently, because of just the scale of engagements in places like Ukraine, it's not a thing that even people who are veterans of recent conflicts, Americans at least, are familiar with because it has happened to some extent, but like nothing like you, you nothing even remotely close.

Speaker 1 You haven't had like division artillery fucking shooting 155s at you for hours.

Speaker 1 But that's a modern version, but like think back to this. This is they're going to be using the heaviest munitions they have available that can range these targets.

Speaker 1 And Erz Younger and other World War I veterans write that it was not uncommon for men to simply break and try to run out of the bunker in the middle of a bombardment because people's minds just shatter.

Speaker 1 You just snap. I mean, remember I made you read that book, Moon Tiger, and that description of the gun to the gunner in the tank losing his mind and like being unable to do anything.

Speaker 1 Like that is so fucking real to my experience. Like some people like when it actually happens,

Speaker 1 it's not even a personal failing man. It's people want to talk like it is.
It's not. Some people like when that happens, like being like, I'm going to die, it just, it switches something.

Speaker 1 There's a part of your brain that is set to

Speaker 1 that is not always right that will say i need to do something in order to survive and sometimes the thing it does in order to survive is absolutely the wrong thing to do but you're acting at like an animalistic level at that point and also the thing about it is is that what the military tells you to what military conflict armed conflict you know regimented systems of to do this kind of violence tell you to do is completely Yeah, just sit there and take it.

Speaker 1 Antithetical to survival instinct. And it's like, you're not supposed to master and suppress your own survival instinct.

Speaker 1 And yet, that's why they do so well recruiting guys from the Midwest who make great soldiers. Even the strongest, best-led men break under a bombardment.

Speaker 1 It isn't just something that the human mind is made to comprehend. This goes on all day, day after day, until October 7th.
So it's been several days of just getting rocked.

Speaker 1 That's when the Russian infantry has gotten so close that they're pretty much at the walls of the fort.

Speaker 1 The infantry is so close, it was only after the deafening sound of crashing artillery stopped that a 39-year-old lawyer turned reserve officer, Dr.

Speaker 1 Lieutenant Istvan Bailik, thought he heard something outside the fort's walls. So he turned to his men and have them fire off some flares so he could look into the darkness.

Speaker 1 Bailik suddenly saw tens of thousands of Russian infantry advancing towards them. The surprise ruined.

Speaker 1 The Russian artillery then turned on giant spotlights and aimed them directly at the defenders' firing ports, blinding them.

Speaker 1 Now, this really doesn't matter at this point because there's so many Russian infantry crawling towards them that you couldn't miss you just kind of point your rifle out the hole and pull the trigger you might be wondering well that's fine the fortress complex has like a thousand cannons on it the russians are right out in the open dead to rights right like just start dropping steel on them you think well balik tried to do that he got on a field phone and begged for artillery support but it never came now the artillery support in the fortress city is obviously split into several different commands.

Speaker 1 Some of the guns are so old they can't, they're not mutually supportive. So he is relying on artillery based in the southwest of the fortress city.

Speaker 1 That commander, Yanko Suradajinkinka, had a complete mental breakdown while under artillery bombardment.

Speaker 1 And while Balik is on the phone trying to get him to fire his artillery at the Russians, he is apparently just rocking back and forth doing the sign of the cross and screaming, oh my God, over and over and over again.

Speaker 1 which, to be clear here, is what I would probably be doing as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You can't really

Speaker 1 cast aspersions, but from the purest tactical analysis, that's kind of not what you want to be happening.

Speaker 1 Militarily, it's not the right thing to do.

Speaker 1 Though I would say Sfriajinka is only faulted by he didn't double down and be extra safe by also praying to every other god just to be careful in case his heaven's wrong.

Speaker 1 Exactly. You got to say,

Speaker 1 get those fucking very unhappy privates to translate your prayers into as many languages as possible. Quick, get me one of the Bosnians.
I need to say the Shahada just to be safe.

Speaker 1 The Russians continued to advance, throwing bridges over the defensive ditches that had been dug around the forts, with many units getting so close that defending Ukrainians in Baylik's unit could overhear them speaking Russian to one another.

Speaker 1 And it's for some comical relief here. They would scream out swear words back at them, knowing the Russians could understand them, which is always lovely.

Speaker 1 I always like when a soldier's first instinct is like, tell that guy I fucked his mom. I don't know how to say it, but yell it for me.

Speaker 1 While there's thousands of people trying to murder you, you're just like spitting roast battles over the fortress walls.

Speaker 1 There's a phenomenon in the United Kingdom of like scammers pretending to be like offering you deals from like different cell phone companies.

Speaker 1 And 3Mobile is one of them, particularly where you get these. It's like scammers in the UK and also scammers in places like India.
And it's really annoying. It's really predictable.

Speaker 1 And like, I got a call one time. And I was just like, man, you guys are fucking scammers.

Speaker 1 off leave me alone take me off your list and i hung up and then about two hours later a guy called me from the united kingdom and i was on the tram and i picked up the phone and i answered in in french just because i yeah you know whatever i was like i bet you this is a scammer and he's like i am your sister don't come home i your sister i was like did you call me back after work to talk to me Yeah, a hundred years ago, the scammers would be doing this over the fortress walls at each other.

Speaker 1 And so when you mentioned that to me, I was like, in the heat of battle, man's still going to fucking say a roast about the other person's mom. I'm like, I understand that sentiment.

Speaker 1 I'm taking cover in a trench. I'm reloading my bolt-action rifle.
My cell phone is not working. And I know that guy on the other side of the wall is the one who sold it to me.

Speaker 1 But sorry, I guess then it'd be like my carrier pigeon's broken or something.

Speaker 1 But it also kind of implies that the closest you can get to a World War I trench battle or fucking fortified engagement against a defensive position is a scammer call center. That those guys basically

Speaker 1 live in the Somme. They live in Passchendale.

Speaker 1 They live in the mental palace of Passchendale.

Speaker 1 Because it's like a war of attrition to get rid of them. They'll keep blowing up your phone.
I get them here.

Speaker 1 And for one, I know it's a scam because I'm getting a call on my normal phone number from a Dutch phone number. I always use WhatsApp for everything anyway.

Speaker 1 And they answer in English, which nobody does. Yeah.
And they'll say that you're like, you're wanted at the police station for something to do with your ID. Like, no, I'm not.

Speaker 1 Like, I get those sometimes where they call me and tell me that I like wanted for something by the Geneva police. And it's like, once again, they would be speaking French.

Speaker 1 Secondly, like, I'm sorry, but even the stuff you need to know to renew your fucking visa isn't in English. So like, I damn sure know the cops aren't calling me and speaking English at me.
So exactly.

Speaker 1 I am laughing, though, the idea that like the trench is like the Paschendala from the German side because you're getting yelled at incoherently by Brits all day long. So

Speaker 1 it fits.

Speaker 1 This goes on for hours until eventually the Southwestern artillery opens fire anyway without orders because the commander's subordinate simply like threw him in a closet and took command of the artillery without him.

Speaker 1 Like, look, you can pray to God in there.

Speaker 1 We've gotten you a Buddhist, a Muslim, a Scientologist, a priest. Like, you can pray to all the gods for us, but we're going to take the cannons.

Speaker 1 The Russians were so close that the subordinate that took over the cannons had them depress the cannons all the way to the ground and load canister shot to fire into them.

Speaker 1 So the direct fire artillery.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And this works horrifically. I imagine.

Speaker 1 The artillery melts the advancing Russians with canister shot and destroys the bridges that they had placed over the ditches where, of course, the witches go to burn.

Speaker 1 And this leaves the rest of the attackers to try to crawl up the ditches behind them, which are 10 feet deep on either side. Well, I mean, there are Romanians involved here, I imagine.

Speaker 1 So it's possible that they did, in fact, dig through the ditches and burn to the witches and slam in the back of my Dragula. Exactly.
You have to open it. You have to direct fire the Dragula

Speaker 1 as it's burning ass across no man's land rob zombie was speaking to a really specific experience in eastern european history i didn't know that rob zombie is actually a galatian nationalist it's really weird i don't know

Speaker 1 rob zombie's canadian

Speaker 1 then the fort's machine guns finally opened fire because they were there this is world war one after all but put on our time machine hats here and remember machine guns at the time of World War I were commanded by artillery sections.

Speaker 1 Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah.
Yeah, pretty much across the board. They all fell under artillery.

Speaker 1 Sometimes they're called machine gun artillery, but because the artillery commander was, you know, trying to find Jesus, Muhammad, and Tom Cruise all at the same time, he wasn't ordering them to open fire.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he was becoming a Wiccan and getting really mad at all the trees getting destroyed out there. Why does the commander's bunker smell like clove cigarettes?

Speaker 1 Just your blessed bee getting yelled at from the closet.

Speaker 1 So finally the machine guns come into play. This begins harvesting more Russian meat per square meter than anything had so far.

Speaker 1 However, so many Russians have been shot and fell back into the ditch, of course, helped by the tactical Dracula, that this created some good old-fashioned corpse infrastructure to allow still advancing Russians to climb over all of the Sergeys at their feet.

Speaker 1 The ditch has been full. The witches have been burned.

Speaker 1 The Dracula has been hit by canister shots.

Speaker 1 They've actually overloaded the suspension of the Dracula.

Speaker 1 So this is effectively like a historical example of the oft-sighted thing we talk about in the show, the meat wave.

Speaker 1 We've got the meat wave. It's the meat wave.

Speaker 1 At this point, they've been attacking for two hours, and Balik's force had been reduced to just 40 men on the walls.

Speaker 1 So he ordered them to withdraw, only to discover the inner fort door had been sealed shut behind them.

Speaker 1 So Balik was forced to pound on the door, screaming at the men inside in like eight different languages until one hit and they opened the doors for him and let him in. Oh, wow.

Speaker 1 Inside, however, they were trapped in the inner fortress. The Russians had seethed over the walls at this point, and they were in the trenches and now they're on the fort's very roof.

Speaker 1 But they could not find a way inside. So there's like a hundred dudes in some change trapped inside this fortress with about 15 to 20,000 Russians outside.

Speaker 1 Each time they got near a door, their skulls got blown apart by a conscript mechanic in their mid-40s on the inside.

Speaker 1 They had brought with them gun cotton, which is very flammable and explosive, to stuff down the ventilation tubes that try to blow it open. However, a lot of it got lost in the attack.

Speaker 1 Some of it got wet because it started raining. So they have no gun cotton to blow open the fort.

Speaker 1 They only have like 30 hand grenades and how, who knows how many of those actually died out in the field, you know, with the dudes carrying them.

Speaker 1 So they had no way to actually force their way into this fort. So they kept just trying to stick their guns in through the gun slots and opening fire.

Speaker 1 And each time the Russians would do that, like six dudes from the Landsterm would jump on it and pull it all the way through or start hacking at the dudes' hands with like knives or shovels or anything.

Speaker 1 In short, this worked. Trapped inside and controlling very small routes of approach, a single rifleman could hold off entire companies.

Speaker 1 It's just the sheer volume of frustration at work here is very funny.

Speaker 1 It's just like, you know, there's the three-to-one sort of notion in U.S.

Speaker 1 Army tactics, which basically that to attack a fortified position, you need three times as many attackers as defenders, and vice versa.

Speaker 1 When you kind of calculate to plan a defense, assume a platoon can hold off a battalion kind of thing.

Speaker 1 But a platoon is typically in U.S. Army-ish ease between 30 and 35 guys.
So if one rifleman is holding off a company, let's do some math here. Let's do some math math here.

Speaker 1 If one rifleman is holding off a company, that means that four riflemen of fire team are holding off a battalion, which implies the squad is two battalions or like a regiment minus, which means four squads is basically a division.

Speaker 1 Yep. And think of this one.
He's holding off a division, which means a company is holding off

Speaker 1 basically an army.

Speaker 1 That's exactly what happens.

Speaker 1 This is so funny. And it's even funnier to think about that Balik, who is in command of this entire cluster fuck locked into the fortress, can't even talk to half of his own men.

Speaker 1 This is like StarCraft math.

Speaker 1 You're like completely like just owning a Zerg Rush right now.

Speaker 1 Oh my God, that's so funny. This lasted until 7 a.m.

Speaker 1 So about four hours when a massive counterattack from the fortress reserve pushed the Russians back and Balik was able to emerge from the fortress alive.

Speaker 1 And during those times when they were locked in the fortress, they barely took any casualties. This is so fun.

Speaker 1 This is so funny this is like the platonic ideal of what would happen if your neighbor is being a dumbass and banging on your door and yelling at you or something like that you're just like guess what i could hold off 10 times 100 times you guys nothing can make me open this door your gun cotton i have soaked in blood so many ukrainian mechanics in their mid-40s in my basement ready for you

Speaker 1 The meat wave didn't work. Gun cotton soaked in blood and it rained on you.
That means God hates you. And the commander knows he's talked to every God that's ever ever existed.

Speaker 1 He's confirmed that shit.

Speaker 1 He's over there praying so hard. He's invented a sixth religion that nobody's ever heard of.
Exactly.

Speaker 1 Which I think is just that weird Russian cult where that former cop thinks he's Jesus Christ, which I forget what they call themselves. He's a fucking Zoroastrian now.

Speaker 1 The most fucked up pantheon the world has ever seen.

Speaker 1 God damn it.

Speaker 1 And here's the crazy part. A few days later, on October 12th, the Austro-Hungarian forces really did launch a huge counterattack to relieve the fortress and force Brasilov to break off the siege.

Speaker 1 But like every gain made by them during the war, this would be terribly temporary for the people inside.

Speaker 1 As the Austrian garrison attempted to repair damages done to the southwest during the assault, the Austro-Hungarian Field Army under the command of von Hotzendorf joined forces with the Russian 9th Army under Paul von Hindenburg, and what resulted was the Battle of the Vistula.

Speaker 1 This is after the Battle of Tannenberg, for chronological purposes. So nobody in the German command is really taking the Russians seriously anymore.

Speaker 1 So you can kind of imagine Hindenburg's mindset going into this battle, and that is why they end up getting the shit kicked out of them.

Speaker 1 Both armies are driven from the field on October 31st, with both Holzendorf and Hindenburg blaming each other because neither of these men could historically ever take blame for anything that they've ever done.

Speaker 1 Once again, the defenders of Primusil stood and watched as their allies retreated around them.

Speaker 1 And once again, Hotendorf ordered Kuzmanik to hold the fortress no matter what, and we'll be back for you again. This time, however, Kuzmanik was not so sure of that.

Speaker 1 And I think he had a pretty good idea this time around that he was going to be on his own.

Speaker 1 During the first siege, before it all started, the Russians actually sent a peace delegation to be like, hey, why don't you just surrender? We won't even take your POW. Just pack up and leave.

Speaker 1 We don't care. And Kuzmanek had actually laughed at them.
Mostly because his orders stated that you're supposed to fight no matter what.

Speaker 1 But he thought the idea of them surrendering was just ridiculous. This time around, however, he saw the Austrian and German field armies leaving.

Speaker 1 And one of the first things he did was order 18,000 civilians within the fortress to leave, namely women and children, because joining the retreating armies and getting the fuck out of there was certainly a better option than being trapped in a second siege.

Speaker 1 However, despite the order, 30,000 civilians remained in the city. And there's another good reason as why Kuzmanik thought this time around is going to be much worse.
It's October.

Speaker 1 October is turning into November, and they're in a fortress in the Carpathian Mountains as winter is closing in. Shit isn't going to get grim.

Speaker 1 And on November 10th, the Russian army showed back up, but not the same one as before. The Russian 11th Army under Andrei Seleninov soon surrounded them.

Speaker 1 Seleninov had no business being in campaign in winter. He was in his mid-60s and was already suffering from what most people considered tuberculosis.
But this is Russia we're talking about.

Speaker 1 In a way, he would be the odd man out if he didn't. have tuberculosis.
Wait, you're not 80 and have tuberculosis? Get in uniform. Unlike before, he had no assaults planned.

Speaker 1 Instead, he would settle in for the classic horror-inducing siege tactic of digging in and just waiting for the people inside to starve for as long as it would take.

Speaker 1 Because remember, the Russian military is sitting on a dedicated rail transport network. They really don't got to worry about anything.
It's going to be cold.

Speaker 1 Diseases are going to hurt them, but they're not going to starve. They'll be fine.

Speaker 1 Despite this, Kuzmatic thought the best thing he could do was just let life in Priest Misile continue as it had for morale's sake. The fortress city had theaters, schools, parks.

Speaker 1 You know, it's a city before it's a fortress. All these things that normal life had before the war that makes normal life normal life.
So he just let people keep going about their lives.

Speaker 1 He made sure to go to the theater and watch plays and comedies with people in order to keep morale up so they could see the commander of the siege is there with them so things can't be that bad, even as things were getting progressively harder.

Speaker 1 Artillery wasn't crashing down on the civilian areas, at least not yet.

Speaker 1 That was kept the fortress positions miles away, but everyone could hear the constant shelling to the point that it was remarked that occasionally teachers had to wait until the loudest explosion stopped so the students in front of them could hear them talk and for my sake here the theater that they went to was called the olympia so just imagine a world war one siege starvation version of the mr olympia i was thinking something different i was like it's olympia like olympia washington so what you're saying is everybody's doing heroin there no it's like well we have to lighten things up so in between guard shifts, you know, holding off the Russian meat wave, we're listening to Austro-Hungarian Sleeder Kinney play really plaintive rock music.

Speaker 1 I'd be on the show. I mean, it's Olympia, so you could be going there to listen to Austro-Hungarian Nirvana as well.
That's true. Yeah.
I mean,

Speaker 1 the heroin thing is probably applicable there for sure. Yeah.
I mean, it's really hard to get up there from Austro-Hungarian Aberdeen, where Kurt Kobane is from. Kurt Kobanovich.

Speaker 1 People keep making jokes when I talk about like, oh, we have lake beaches in Geneva and we make do. They're like, oh, I guess Geneva is the Chicago of Europe.

Speaker 1 And now I'm kind of wondering like, what is the Puget Sound of Eastern Europe? I got to find that out, you know? Ah, the Crimea.

Speaker 1 I don't know. I don't know.
Someone's going to have to answer. Help us out.
Help us out, actual Eastern Europeans. You guys know better.

Speaker 1 I mean, we think it's cold and rainy and dark all the time, but it's also on the beach. It's like, obviously, it's the Baltics.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 temperate-wise, I feel like the Netherlands is very close to Washington, but without any of the depression. Yeah.
I could see that. I don't know.

Speaker 1 We got to find the happy medium or I guess the depressed medium is what we're looking for.

Speaker 1 Well, if you're looking for the depressed medium of like it's that dark and wet, mild, but grim, and it's also depressed. There's an island about 50 miles north of you that's full of that shit.
Chuck,

Speaker 1 and everybody there is quite unpleasant, just like the Pacific Northwest. And I say that as someone who really likes the Pacific Northwest.
People are not the friendliest.

Speaker 1 Seattle nice, Dutch nice, the kind of rhyme, you know? No, I don't know. No, no, it's different.
Like, Dutch are not rude. People from the Pacific Northwest, especially Seattleites, are rude as fuck.

Speaker 1 Yeah, fair enough. So,

Speaker 1 London is more like second Seattle. Okay.
In my opinion. Except that.
So big Indiana, but second Seattle is. We still haven't discovered Eastern Eastern European Seattle.
If you know, let us know.

Speaker 1 Yeah, let us know. We'd really like it.
Like, yeah, you know, maritime, not too hot, not too cold, although it can be hot and very cold. Rude, grim, depressed.
A little heroin. Figure it out.

Speaker 1 Figure it out. The heroin is foundational.
Yeah. But all this is going on during the opening parts of the siege.

Speaker 1 As time wears on rations dwindle and soon normalcy for the sake of morale ended and primacile transformed into a city of the starved and the kind of predators that emerge whenever situations like this happen without going into too much detail here but it became commonplace for soldiers who are rationed more food than civilians to bribe civilians with their extra food for uh reasons stuff yeah

Speaker 1 yeah look it's not like i don't want to talk about dark shit there's a time and place for all that but there's only so many times I could say soldiers sexually exploited a population until I feel like a really depressing version of DJ Khaled.

Speaker 1 So, Jesus Christ. All right.
Okay.

Speaker 1 That was not the phrase. That's not the phrasing that I was expecting you to go for, but I do understand entirely what you're saying.
Just a big long side, no music behind me. And it's like,

Speaker 1 another one. Yeah.
Yeah. Depressed Joe Khalid.
That's what the DJs dance for.

Speaker 1 Staring into the Chernobyl elephant's foot of trauma and abuse and just be like, major key.

Speaker 1 But I should pause here and explain one unique facet of the siege, at least in the annals of the things that we've talked about before, and that is sexual exploitation became institutional from the staff level until the point it actively hurt the ability of the defenders to continue doing their jobs.

Speaker 1 This is from the diary of Joseph Tomman, an Austrian military doctor who talks about this. Quote, the hospitals have been recruiting teenage girls as nurses.
They get 120 crowns a month in free meals.

Speaker 1 They are, with very few exceptions, utterly useless. Their main job is to satisfy the lust of the officers and, rather shamefully, a number of the doctors, too.

Speaker 1 New officers are coming in almost daily with cases of syphilis, gonorrhea, and soft cancer. Soft cancer is like his way of saying it was like a bacterial infection.
Understood, yeah.

Speaker 1 So they are literally kneecapping their own ability to care, they give medical support to their soldiers because they are entrapping young women into being sex workers for food.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, that doesn't surprise me, but still, like, that's horrific. Yeah.
Like, it's like one of the things that we're not trying to make light of it.

Speaker 1 It's just one of these things where also we're not trying to be like, oh, let's not talk about the bad stuff because we want to have a kitsch podcast. It's just more like, this is.

Speaker 1 This is a time and a place. We definitely do heavy episodes.
We tell you it's going to be heavy, but we don't want to just throw it at you out of nowhere with a curveball.

Speaker 1 But it does impact the actual siege portion that we're talking about, which is why I feel like I hate to bring that up.

Speaker 1 Where it's like, if you got wounded, you would get no medical care because officers literally got rid of all of it for

Speaker 1 sexual exploitation. And also, some of the two women.

Speaker 1 And a more, I guess, kind of more abstracted way, too, that like this is going to create an incredible amount of enmity, distrust, and even hatred amongst the civilians who are also critically important during a siege defense.

Speaker 1 Oh,

Speaker 1 that brings up our next point, and that is, Tommins was not the only diary that survived the war that I read for this episode.

Speaker 1 Primasil was by nature of being a garrison town in the Eastern Austro-Hungarian Empire, very diverse, meaning that these diaries are racist as fuck.

Speaker 1 More than a few of them just blame the Jews for everything that's happening.

Speaker 1 What did I do? Which good news for those people, the Cossacks are the first Russian soldiers into town, which I'm sure that they're huge fans of.

Speaker 1 And you're probably wondering where'd all these diaries come from, right?

Speaker 1 This survives thanks to a weird quirk of the siege and also World War I. And that is airplanes were still pretty new, but useless to help lift the siege.

Speaker 1 They could be used for limited air mail. So people were sending letters back and forth through all of this.
Right.

Speaker 1 But the airplanes couldn't exactly bring them like food or medicine that they needed because they couldn't carry that much. So they survived all like...

Speaker 1 grandma and grandpappy's racist fucking diaries but couldn't bring a sausage or or like i don't know whatever gonorrhea medicine was back then Yeah.

Speaker 1 Please preserve this for humanity, like a time capsule. Bear witness to our suffering.
And you send them like a diary. It's like the world's most racist sketch cartoons of Romanians for some reason.

Speaker 1 It's like, I'm really happy that you airlifted me copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion translated into Ukrainian. Thanks for that.

Speaker 1 Didn't really need this.

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly. It's just like a cartoon about like average Slovakian brain be like.

Speaker 1 Like, what is the word from the front? It's like, oh, they've only sent racist caricatures again.

Speaker 1 Write them back and ask for the condition at the front. Oh, we got another letter.
It's the Jews. God damn it.
Who keeps giving these people

Speaker 1 the weight to fly them out on airplanes? These are, oh, by the way, these are all military airplanes that this is being used for. I'm assimilated.

Speaker 1 I get it, but I'm also of Jewish extraction enough that I feel comfortable being able to make this joke that it must have been really kind of inconvenient to get like an actual tactical picture back in these days because like everyone is so so anti-Semitic, and you are too.

Speaker 1 And they're like, oh, it's the Jews. And we're like, well, you're like, yeah, yeah, I know it is, but also, like, what is the actual tactical picture we're looking at?

Speaker 1 It's like, guys, you got to take me somewhere. Conrad van Holzendorf is like, of course, it was the Jews, but I need to know what the front looks like.
Exactly.

Speaker 1 It's like, could you at least give me a frontline trace? Yes, I realize that it is, in fact, the Jewish menace, but like, could you please? I really need to know right now.

Speaker 1 His tactical map is just like a Charlie Kelly diagram of increasingly more racist cartoons taped to the wall.

Speaker 1 It's like, guys, listen, like, all right, we've had enough professional military education here, and we have actually reviewed the results of scouting missions enough to know that this sketch of an enormous octopus doing sinister shit around the world probably isn't an accurate representation of enemy positions right now.

Speaker 1 Meanwhile, there's like one like Hungarian Turkish guy. It's like, don't blame it.
Don't look at me. I blame the Armenians.

Speaker 1 Can you imagine like being the one normal Turkish guy during this time? It's like, it must be so inconvenient.

Speaker 1 His career probably didn't go far. Nah, it probably didn't.

Speaker 1 But the Austrians weren't the only people with planes, and soon, Russian planes appeared in the sky as well, though they were not carrying airmail.

Speaker 1 Instead, they were conducting one of the first bombing attacks against civilian targets of World War I. A proud tradition they carry on to this very day.

Speaker 1 Disease, however, was the major killer in the fortress city, which I'm sure does not surprise anybody who's been listening to this show for long enough. No.
And cholera was the main killer.

Speaker 1 But as winter crept in, frostbite and exposure entered the podium, claiming soldiers and civilians alike.

Speaker 1 By the the end of January, they had already eaten their last of their strategic meat resource, which was the 21,000 horses inside the fortress, just stacking horse bodies because finally their supply line to Tesco was severed.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's like, on one hand, we are eating man's one true enemy. On the other hand, it's never a good sign when we get down to the last horse.

Speaker 1 It's never a good sign if you're in the military or any situation where you end up eating the horses. Like, look, I dislike horses as much as just about anybody on earth.

Speaker 1 But I know if I'm eating my mode of transportation, it's a really like, if I was in Afghanistan cutting succulent slices of MRAT meat off of my

Speaker 1 bad fucking position.

Speaker 1 Like, because if you have to bug out and you have to carry stuff, like, then you become the horse. In the way, that's the horse's revenge.

Speaker 1 You might eat the horse, or the horse is like, just you wait, motherfucker. You're going to be neighing and clop clopping very soon.

Speaker 1 Ask not who the bell clip clops for.

Speaker 1 It clip clops for thee.

Speaker 1 And soon they're going to be eating you. And off this pedestal, these words appear.

Speaker 1 Everybody's wearing horse skins. Their teeth have been replaced by horse teeth because Dubai had not yet been implanting veneers on everybody.

Speaker 1 They've invented a folk religion about the land of the one big apple.

Speaker 1 The land of the

Speaker 1 land of the small children trying to defend.

Speaker 1 That's what the lieutenant was inventing in the bunker.

Speaker 1 He comes out dressed like a very weird horse cryptid with big fake teeth, an apple in each hand, trampling the nearest child. Eastern horseodoxy.

Speaker 1 God damn it.

Speaker 1 It's a horse in a stable, but the foot part under the stable is tilted slightly differently. Yeah, they got the patriarchhood on the horse.

Speaker 1 By early 1915, the garrison of middle-aged dudes manning the walls is compared to that of a procession of ghosts, turned to skin and bones and weeping sores, and as we've established, horse parts, thanks to starvation and illness.

Speaker 1 By March 1st, one in eight were in the hospital getting, again, absolutely zero medical treatment because the nurses had all been hired based on how badly the officers wanted to fuck them.

Speaker 1 The whole time this is going on, the Austrian field army was attempting to break through to the fortress, but failed each time. And it's not like they were really far away or anything.

Speaker 1 They were 50 miles away, meaning the people in the fortress could see them on a clear day, which has to be even worse. Yeah.
You know, you're like, that's our salvation right there, but can't do shit.

Speaker 1 They might as well have been on a different planet. And eventually, Kuzmanik was informed via airmail that no more breakthrough attempts would be made, and he was officially on his own.

Speaker 1 On March 13th, the Russians inched forward and took the northernmost part of the fortress, forcing the shambling corpses of the still upright defenders to form a new line.

Speaker 1 But at this point, it's clear to everyone that the end was near. And this is where things get kind of weird.

Speaker 1 I mean, weirder, I should suppose. I mean, we did just invent a religion.
We did.

Speaker 1 Kuzmanic gets, it's debated whether he comes up with this idea or someone gives it to him that they need to do a breakout attempt.

Speaker 1 And for people who don't know, that means sally out, attempt to break out of a siege and get away. Kuzmanic never really writes about this.
It seems to just kind of happen.

Speaker 1 Someone else posits as like maybe they wanted to do it as like before they surrender to do something to give them to like be proud of. We took the fight to them before we surrender.

Speaker 1 However, absolutely nobody thinks this breakout attempt is going to work.

Speaker 1 Kuzmanik, his subordinate officers, they don't think that their men are in any shape to march, let alone actually march somewhere and fight.

Speaker 1 One officer said, Even if we did break out successfully, our men do not have the strength to march 50 miles to meet up with the field officers.

Speaker 1 50 miles is a very long time when you are at literal starvation level. Like, yeah, five miles is the insane amount when you're that bad.
Dribbling various juices from different diseases. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But on March 19th, Kuzmanik orders 40,000 men, and it was limited to 40,000 because that's how many could still stand and walk to go on the attack. It collapses as soon as the Russians shoot at them.

Speaker 1 They lose like 10,000 men killed and wounded. To be fair, some of those could just be like that person was mostly cholera at that point and they died just walking over there.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's like you touch something that's been really burned to ash and it just crumbles basically. It's like, but it's a guy.
He's still talking.

Speaker 1 He's still being normal, but you touch him and then he just he does like a cigarette butt, just

Speaker 1 cigarette ash, just fucking completely blown away in the wind. He goes the step off, but he's so rotten on the inside, his skeleton just tears through his own skin.

Speaker 1 I hate it when I try to take shit right before the attack, and I unzip, and it turns out I'm full of bugs, like oogie bookie from the nightmare before Christmas.

Speaker 1 Oh, horse Jesus, please help me,

Speaker 1 horses Christos,

Speaker 1 Patriarch Secretariat, please

Speaker 1 the artillery lieutenant stomping like clip-clopping on the concrete around you like remember two stomps means go one stop means stay

Speaker 1 oh my goodness stations of the cross be trot cancer and gallop

Speaker 1 mass is basically dressage

Speaker 1 mass is dressage and like the holy sacrament is used to have to like eat hay directly from the hand of the priest.

Speaker 1 Do not curl your fingers around the hay while you're taking communion.

Speaker 1 First communion is decided when the horse doesn't immediately try to stomp you to death. You're old enough as a child.

Speaker 1 Well, that's the official new religion of the podcast.

Speaker 1 I feel like this might be an incredibly sacrilegious t-shirt idea that you can only wear in a certain country. It's Eastern Orthodoxy.
Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 You know what? I mean, neither of us had any idea going into this episode this this was going to be a thing we'd start roofing around.

Speaker 1 Like we, Joe writes the scripts, and I try to stay somewhat informed, but I didn't know.

Speaker 1 That's the glory of Horsus Christos is sometimes his guiding light just brings you to the bit. It does.
Like literally and figuratively, because he also has a bit.

Speaker 1 It's the immaculate conception, except for the fact there's a huge pile of horseshit.

Speaker 1 Not so immaculate, but figuratively speaking, that's what we're going to call it. Kuzmanic, knowing he was going to surrender, ordered every single fort to be blown up before doing so.

Speaker 1 So, in a single night, dozens of forts were blown sky high simultaneously, with people watching it in the middle comparing it to a ring of volcanoes exploding all at the same time, which had to look cool as hell.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, it sucks to be in that situation, but it's one of those things where it's like, well, you are getting to see something that's sick.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you might be dying of cholera, but you want to see a sick explosion. Yeah, it's like the least we can do for these guys who are going to die because like their guts are basically already

Speaker 1 is do the fucking fireworks for the video for that the audio slave song coaches. Just fucking just explode non-stop.
It's like, well, that was like four minutes was badass. Now you can die now.

Speaker 1 So on March 22nd, 1915, after holding on for six months, Kuzmanik formally ordered his men to surrender.

Speaker 1 Some of the first Russian units to enter Primasil were Cossacks, like I talked about, and you know exactly what they did next. Beheadings, sabers, pogroms.
Yeah, pogroms. Yeah, all that.

Speaker 1 Which, according to the letters from some people sent out from the city, they were probably happy to see.

Speaker 1 The Cossacks proudly proclaimed that the fortress was theirs forever, which was true, as long as you consider forever about three months.

Speaker 1 In June, the Germans launched a massive offensive to retake the area in an effort to make sure no Russian invasion of Hungary would happen.

Speaker 1 The offensive was successful, at least temporarily, since we all know, spoiler alert, how World War I ends. In case you weren't up to speed on that, you haven't kept up with this season.

Speaker 1 It's troubling.

Speaker 1 It's like when you watch you know passion of the christ don't tell me how it fucking ends i don't know the personal story from this being like i always hadn't seen the sopranos and started to watch the sopranos from the beginning and cynthia was like do not look at any sopranos memes even if like you think because like they're gonna assume the show is 25 years old at this point you have probably seen it completely ruined a season three spoiler surprise to me but my own fault yeah you you can't blame anybody for spoiling something for you that's 20 years old and i know i say that after begging people to not ruin a vangillion for me because we're watching it for lights up by robots and that is well over 20 years old but the rule stands getting really mad someone told me that darth vader is luke skywalker's dad getting really really hurt god forbid you

Speaker 1 know german and see that his name is dark father

Speaker 1 but for the sake of the war and austria's and hoseendorf's constant fuck-ups between 1914 and 1915 It also meant Austria would not really be able to do much of anything without German assistance going forward.

Speaker 1 This is how eventually the various battles of the Asanzo are broken as well as with German assistance because Austria-Hungary really became little more than like a ball and chain around the German Empire's foot at this point.

Speaker 1 The siege, the relief efforts, and the eventual surrender caused Austria-Hungary over 1 million casualties.

Speaker 1 Casualties unlike the Russians they were hard pressed to replace and in reality, they would never recover from. Kuzmanek was a POW for three years before being released.

Speaker 1 survived the war and survived to see the collapse of the dual monarchy and lived all the way until 1934 when he died, which in my opinion is the perfect time for an Austrian aristocrat to die before, you know, the rest of your history gets very complicated.

Speaker 1 Before events transpire, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 The end.

Speaker 1 Well, that was very funny and also very dark. That was grimmer.
I didn't realize that just the Austrian.

Speaker 1 Just the Austria-Hungary side was going to be a million casualties.

Speaker 1 I felt remiss to not tell you this because I thought you would find this very funny as one of my stupid asides that I had to follow up with is that when they filmed the video for Cochise, it was in like the summer of 2002, 2002, which obviously a little bit of a tense time in America, given what it happened less than a year prior.

Speaker 1 And they were doing basically like the final finale of like fireworks shows, but like non-stop filming this video for like, you know, 30 minutes of how many takes they had to do.

Speaker 1 And a bunch of people called the cops because they're like, I think 9-11.2 is happening right now.

Speaker 1 I think the guy from Soundgarden's doing

Speaker 1 damn

Speaker 1 Osama bin Laden's been one-upped. Chris Cornell is now leading on Soundgarden.

Speaker 1 God damn it.

Speaker 1 Chris Cordell, R.I.P. You didn't do 9-11 too.
What a fucking voice. R.I.P.

Speaker 1 I'm just joking saying that in 2002, you were in charge of Al-Qaeda. Though that would be very funny.
Matt Cameron forced to choose if he wants to become the drummer for Al-Qaeda or not.

Speaker 1 Much like the Sex Pistols, they're forced to tour the southern United States, and they're very unpopular.

Speaker 1 But, mate, we do a thing on this show called Questions from the Legion.

Speaker 1 If you'd like to ask us a question, support the show on Patreon and you can leave us a message on patreon or in our discord channel which you'll also have access to and has a channel dedicated to questions from the legion and today's question is what book tv show or piece of media has an ending so awful it still haunts you to this day i think awful they mean like shitty like ruins the the medium um huh that's a really good question it's a really good question I think the easy answer here is certainly Game of Thrones.

Speaker 1 Like, it had an ending so bad that go back in time and just remember how popular it was. And that ending, that final, like honestly, final two seasons were so bad that it

Speaker 1 I've never seen a hype train become so derailed, deservingly so, to the point that like George Martin is just not going to finish reading the books now, certainly, because that was the ending he had planned.

Speaker 1 He has said a million times that was the ending he had planned. And then it went over like a wet fart.
Yeah. And then he was like, I'm done.
I got to think about that one.

Speaker 1 Because, I mean, in terms of like, it's a bad ending to a movie or a series. Movie, TV show.
It could be a book, any piece of media. It's interesting for me because

Speaker 1 off the top of my head, I really have to think about this.

Speaker 1 I mean, I think that season five of The Wire kind of sucks. It's really stupid.
I haven't seen it.

Speaker 1 Basically, you can really tell that Ed Burns had to go do another project and wasn't there to moderate

Speaker 1 fucking David Simon because it goes in some really stupid directions. So I would say season four of The Wire is so insanely good, and then season five is not good.

Speaker 1 And I think the way it ends is quite, it requires a lot of suspension or disbelief and just feels dumb.

Speaker 1 How I Met Your Mother was another one as well. Ended really badly.
The ending, not necessarily bad in terms of, but like surprise ending that I cannot believe happened.

Speaker 1 And I'm just like, oh, God, I don't know if I can watch any more of this show. Season four

Speaker 1 of, I think it's season four of Top Boy. Basically, because there's the two seasons from early 2010s, and then they brought it back.

Speaker 1 And then there was the so in the U.S., it's Top Boy's Summerhouse is the first two. And then they bring it back, and it becomes a much more like complicated show.

Speaker 1 The very last scene of the very last episode of, I believe it's the fourth season, ends with a surprise twist that I did not see coming. And I'm like, oh my fucking God, I can't believe they did that.

Speaker 1 And it's like, oh, wow.

Speaker 1 Basically, a character that has been integral that you were really hanging on to, that things seem to be working out for gets killed in the last 30 seconds, completely by surprise. And it's earned.

Speaker 1 Like, it's actually earned, but it's just like, oh, my fucking God.

Speaker 1 And it's like, he gets killed in front of his little brother, who's like 13. It's horrible.
And it just comes out of nowhere.

Speaker 1 So it's like, I mean, it makes sense in the story, but that's the last scene.

Speaker 1 It's like, hey, family night with, you know, older brother who's taking care of doing crime shit, but taking care of his family. And then someone's at the door and kills him.

Speaker 1 It's, it's, yeah, that I was like, oh my. I mean, that's kind of, again, from The Wire as well.
I mean, The Wire in season one has something like that. It's really, really hard.

Speaker 1 I don't want to ruin it for anybody in case they go, you should watch The Wire. It's one of the best TV shows ever made.
I've never watched season five yet. I apparently I don't want to.

Speaker 1 I haven't had a show ruined for me yet. It's worth to know the end of the story, but I don't think you really lose much.

Speaker 1 But like, I think with The Wire, like, season one through three is the main story, and season four is just cool, good story, like, very, very good storytelling and really, really engaging and arresting.

Speaker 1 And it's all about like the fuckedness of America's public school system in a city like Baltimore. So it's worth watching.

Speaker 1 Hilariously, one of the, I don't think it's a bad, I think it's a good book. I think the author who wrote this was a quite incredibly fine author in terms of like literary styling.

Speaker 1 The Australian-American author, Shirley Hazard, did not publish a ton, but but what she did publish was very, very highly regarded in sort of like literary fiction. She has two novels.

Speaker 1 I think she has three novels, if I'm not mistaken, I can't remember, but there's two that are quite well known.

Speaker 1 One is called The Transit of Venus, came out in 1978, and another one is called The Great Fire, came out in 2003. They're both quite good.
I like The Great Fire more. Transit of Venus is very good.

Speaker 1 You'll understand, but it's like very much like literary fiction.

Speaker 1 However, however, all of that praise aside, Shirley Hazard kills her protagonist on the last page in a surprise plane crash on the last page.

Speaker 1 And I'm like, wait, this is the same woman who was like kind of snotty about Stephen King being an author talking about storytelling.

Speaker 1 I'm like, ma'am, you basically did a worse ending than the girl who didn't want to keep writing her fucking, was it My Chemical Romance fan fiction? And so she had them die on 9-11.

Speaker 1 Like, you did a worse job. Actually, speaking of Stephen King and bad endings,

Speaker 1 it?

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, it's bad. It ends with, some people call it a gangbang.
That's incorrect. It's a train

Speaker 1 in a sewer. In a sewer, yes.

Speaker 1 They're quite young, aren't they? Like teenagers. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Because you have to defeat it with the power of your relationship or whatever.

Speaker 1 There's a reason why, no matter how many times that piece of media is revisited, nobody has once attempted to recreate that for a good reason. Yeah, it's like they demormonized Endersky.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they un-cocained it. It's so funny, too, because Stephen King obviously has some clunkers, but also some great.
And like 112263 is such a good book, like a shockingly good book.

Speaker 1 yeah he finally figured out how to write an ending at some point and then forgot again i love

Speaker 1 112263's fucking premise is that guys like if i go back in time and buy groceries where they're cheap in the 60s i can sell burgers for cheap in the present day i mean that is like a storyline that i know that book was written probably like 10 years ago now

Speaker 1 but it could still be done now because groceries are groceries be fucking crazy so i mean like it's just just like it's like no i don't want to go back and kill baby hitler but i can buy groceries for cheap i can buy meat for like 10 cents a pound and sell it My burgers are cheap, and everyone loves me.

Speaker 1 And they made a mini-series about it, and I'm pretty sure it stars Gene's Franco, which did not age well.

Speaker 1 Uh, but yeah, that's my answer.

Speaker 1 That's a podcast, Nate. You are involved in many other podcasts.
Plug those podcasts.

Speaker 1 So, I am the co-host of What a Hell of a Way to Dad, a podcast about parenting and also why you shouldn't join the military.

Speaker 1 I am the producer and co-host of Trash Future, a podcast about the tech industry being

Speaker 1 scammy and bad, but also it's a funny podcast. It's not always just us yelling about the news.

Speaker 1 I am also the producer of Kill James Bond, a feminist film podcast that started with Bond Films, but now has gone on to lots of other things, and it's great. It's really entertaining.

Speaker 1 And I advise, I'm not really doing production, but I advise on No God's No Mayors, a podcast about every mayor ever. This is the only podcast that I host, so consider supporting us on Patreon.

Speaker 1 You get episodes like this a week early.

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Speaker 1 So support the show. $5 a month gets you absolutely everything.
And leave us a review wherever it is you listen to podcasts. It helps us immensely, especially when it comes to booking live shows.

Speaker 1 So if you want to see us in a place that is not the United States, because legally our show is a bit sketchy there now, thanks to many of us not being Americans.

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Speaker 1 so we can book venues easier because it helps a lot. And until next time, may Jesus Horsus Christos bless you.

Speaker 1 And with nay.