599. The First World War: Downfall of the Habsburgs (Part 6)

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Until he has experienced all the intricacies of war with his own eyes, his own body, and his own soul, no man can ever truly imagine it.

Marching through sand and marshland, through fathomless swampy forests in the searing heat, with no water in his stomach, groaning in hunger, and then suddenly, as you are plodding along, so tired and bruised and battered, the scene comes alive before you.

The first shots are barking in your ears and the roaring and howling of the shells is getting nearer and nearer.

To one side you hear the crackling of machine gun fire.

You taste the battle, a peculiar sour yet bland taste that settles in your mouth and you feel it.

Because all your nerves and muscles contract and your brain can think of one thing and one thing only.

You have to act.

So that is from the thrillingly titled Kaiser Jaeger.

Persevere.

The heroic death of the 2nd Regiment of the Tyrolean Kaiser Jaeger in the days of September 1914.

It was published in the late 1930s and is quoted in Nick Lloyd's new book on the Eastern Front.

And Dominic, you have written, we've always had a soft spot for the Tyrolean, Kaiser Jaeger, an elite regiment, the Imperial Hunters with lovely sky-blue blue uniforms and feathered hats now I've never had a soft spot for the Tyrulean

Kaiser Jaeger because I've never even heard of them

but as I said in the previous episode we're currently you know we are now on your home territory this is a part of the world you know like the back of your hand you've roamed the mountains you've plunged into the depths of the forests you speak all the languages this is your home territory so tell us What's going on here?

Who are the Tyrulean Kaiser Jaeger?

What is it with their lovely sky blue uniforms and their feathered hats what's going on is it the hell of war or what i imagine it is probably because everything in this series seems to be about the hell of war but surprise us it is the hell of war tom and actually tom you're being falsely modest because you even before we did the rest is history you used to talk to me about the second regiment in particular the tyrolean kaiser jaga they're your they're your favorite regiments of your favorite austro-hungarian unit and don't deny it i am hiding my light under a bushel here but only so that you will blaze all the more brightly that's generosity i think it's the feathered hats that do it for us, isn't it?

So actually, yes, the Tyrulean Kayser Jega had a terrible time in September 1914.

What happens to them is just one aspect of a wider story.

So we began this series more than a year ago with Franz Ferdinand and his assassination in Sarajevo.

And we're ending this part of our great sweep through the First World War by talking about the beginning of the end of Austria-Hungary, the destruction of its army and the fraying of the the bonds that had held the empire together.

So last time we talked about how the Austrians sought to wreak revenge on Serbia and it became a humiliating rout for them and the bloke in charge, General Potiorek, the master of security in Sarajevo, ended up being fired just before Christmas.

And presumably after that, there are no feathers left in the hats of the Tyrolean Kaiser Jaeger.

Not at all.

And today we're turning to the arena in which they saw combat, which is the eastern borderlands of Poland and Ukraine.

It's the area that Timothy Snyder calls Europe's bloodlands in the 20th century.

And at the center of this episode is the story of one city, which is called Psymisl.

What's it called?

It's called Psymischl.

So this was the most formidable fortress of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and it became, the struggle for this fortress became the longest siege of the war.

And I have to be honest with the listeners, the reason I know about this is because I read a brilliant book called The Fortress by the historian Alexander Watson.

So just a massive shout out to this book, The Fortress, because so much of what follows is dependent upon it.

It's a story that's not just a riveting story in and of itself, but it captures the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, an empire with centuries of history, the ethnic cleansing of Eastern Europe and the agony of the Jews of Poland and Ukraine, which begins really here.

So to give a sense of where we are, I'm sure this will immediately help you out, Tom, when I tell you that we're in the kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria.

Of course, we are.

So today, eastern Poland, that's where Peszemiszel is, very close to the Ukrainian border.

Now, at the time, this was Austria's most northeastern province.

It was a crown land, so-called, governed from Vienna.

And the province of Galicia had two big cities.

One is a place then called Lemberg, but which we know as Lviv, and the other is Kraków, now in southeastern Poland.

The area had a very diverse population, so about 45% each Polish, and what was then called called ruthenian what we would now call ukrainian and that leaves about 10 which those people were jewish

and the third biggest city in galicia was this place zemiszl

and i love hearing you say that and

and today it's just a few miles in from the polish border with ukraine what's it called now still called that it's still called zemyszil that's the polish name And it was given an award by Vlodymir Zelensky a couple of years ago for taking so many refugees, so many Ukrainian refugees.

But back then in 1914, in most respects, it was just your classic, sleepy, middle European city.

So it's got a castle and it's a cathedral, it's got loads of churches, it's got synagogues, it's got tons of coffee houses.

And there were about 50,000 people who lived there.

About half of them were Catholics and were Polish.

About a third were Jewish.

And the rest were what were then called kind of Greek Catholics, which is to say they were Ukrainians.

So they're Orthodox, but

they accept the supremacy of the papacy.

Is that right?

Exactly right.

Exactly right.

Yeah.

But there was also a garrison of about 10,000 men for a couple of reasons.

First of all, because Bzemyszol was an important railway junction and it guarded the Carpathian mountain passes into Hungary.

So if you look at a map of Austria-Hungary, in the northeast, there's the great sweep of the Carpathian Mountains, but they're not the border.

There's a bit of Austria-Hungary that's...

on the other side of the Carpathians and this is Galicia.

So this is where this is.

And the second reason why there's this garrison is that since the early 1870s, Pojemyshul had been designated as a fortress city.

So it was designated as the cornerstone of Austria-Hungary's eastern defenses.

So it's kind of the Verdun of Austro-Hungary.

It is Verdun.

Exactly.

A citadel that becomes an emblem

of

sort of national defense, national security.

And kind of a salient.

Yeah, salient, I guess.

Ozgiliath, Tom, for Gondor, i guess so by 1914 they've built this huge fortress and it's a chain of 17 major and 18 minor forts arranged in a 30 mile ring around the city and two lines of trenches so it looks pretty impregnable and inside this this ring there's a huge military base of seven barracks with a rail yard with warehouses with ammunition magazines All of this cost the Austro-Hungarians hundreds and hundreds of millions of pounds in today's money.

And Chirmischel has become this huge symbol of imperial prestige, and the Austrians are very, very proud of it.

Well, it sounds as if they should be.

Sounds brilliant.

Yeah, it's the equivalent of having like a really fancy aircraft carrier today or something of that ilk.

So to the war.

In August 1914, tens of thousands of troops passed through this city heading east to the far border of Galicia to defend it against the Russians.

And as we said in the last episode, they are a very complicated mosaic of Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, whatever.

Not a winning formula under the pressure of total war.

And of course, the man who's commanding them is this bloke, Konrad von Hüzendorf, who has basically started a world war in order to impress his mistress, Gina von Reininghaus, and to get to marry her.

Now, Conrad, as we said in the last episode, when we talked about the complete disaster of the war against Serbia, he is a great believer in attacking spirit.

Even though the Austrians have fewer divisions than the Russians, they have 34, the Russians have 53, he thinks that's fine, we can easily, you know, film and vigor, we'll wipe the floor with the Russians.

So he's developed this insanely ambitious plan to basically envelop the Russians in southern Poland.

But right from the start, as is the way with the Austro-Hungarian military operations, there are some small teething troubles.

So first of all, he says, well, I'll need 11,000 trains to send all these men east.

The train network can only produce 2,000 trains.

So that's nowhere near enough.

These trains travel at only 10 miles an hour, and they stop for six hours every day so the troops can have lunch.

Before they even fire a shot, there are warning signs.

So at one point, they're all, all these troops are going east and the station master, a place called Pod Borgia, which is in eastern Silesia, has a nervous breakdown under the stress of so many people on the network.

He reverses all the signals the wrong way.

The trains all go backwards and then he shoots himself.

Do you know what they should have had?

A monkey.

Jack the Signalman.

Jack the Signalman.

They should have had a monkey.

He's one of his just top monkeys.

Because he never made a mistake paid in beer ran the south african railways for years yeah he was brilliant and for those who may have missed that episode or would like to hear it again it's episode 426 history's greatest monkeys and i wasn't actually expecting them to turn up in the middle of the first world war but you never know well one of them fought in the first world war yeah corporal jackie great to have him back on the show Anyway, back to the Eastern Front.

Eventually, they get off the trains and they set off.

Now, Eastern Galicia is a very poor, very rural part of the empire.

There actually aren't many railways and the roads are shocking.

And most Habsburg soldiers, when they get there, they say, God, this is awful.

This is very hot and it's dusty and it's very alien.

And what are we doing here?

They won a couple of early victories against the Russians, actually, which we won't go into.

But by the end of August, things are starting to go wrong.

The language difficulty is such a massive issue for them.

They can't actually understand what each other are saying.

So the orders are getting muddled.

Some units literally are marching in these vast circles,

going round and round, or they lose touch with their supplies or whatever.

And because of the language difficulty, there are innumerable instances, and this is not funny, of friendly fire.

So, you know, a load of Croats will bump into a load of Czechs and they'll start shooting at each other because they think the others are Russians or Germans and Hungarians or whatever.

So all this chaos is unfolding.

So Dominic, can I just ask, they don't all have a standard uniform?

then?

Do they have, do the different units have different uniforms?

Well, of course, different, yeah, they've not all got feathered hats like the Tyrolean Kaiser Jieger with their sky blue uniforms.

Yeah, so there is scope for complication there.

There's definite scope for complications.

Now, meanwhile, far to the east, the Russians are building up their forces, and soon they outnumber the Austrians almost two to one.

Now, back in Jimischel,

people have no idea what's the troops have been and gone, and people have no idea what's happening at the front.

And then in late August, the first trains of wounded start to arrive in the city.

And a woman who was serving hot drinks to the wounded at the station later described the spectacle.

She said, I saw shot through lungs and hearts, terrible stomach wounds, blood, vomit, feces, but not a single groan, just apathy.

Then on the 30th of August, for the first time, they hear, you call it the crump, I call it the dull thud, of guns in the east.

So the front is clearly coming closer.

Then, an extraordinary scene, a train comes through Przemyshil carrying Russian prisoners.

And as it rolls through the station, a man shoves his head out of the window of the train and he screams out in Polish, Oh, you poor, poor people, a great power is coming towards you.

They will murder you.

God, it really, I mean, it really is like a kind of horror film, isn't it?

The zombies are approaching.

Well, exactly.

So next come a whole load of trains from Lviv.

Lviv is 60 miles away in the east, on the eastern frontier of the empire.

And these trains are packed not with wounded men, but with civilian refugees.

So it's now clear that something out east has gone horribly, horribly wrong.

And actually, when these refugees shout out at the trains and they say, Lviv is in chaos, the mayor, all the officials have fled, the banks have shut down, the streets, the parks are full of wounded soldiers, there's no food, law and order have broken down completely.

It is a bit of a zombie film.

And then...

There are no more trains.

It's as though communications with Lviv have completely gone down because Galicia's capital, Lviv, has fallen to the Russians.

Hello, hello, can you hear me?

Can you hear me?

Exactly like that.

Exactly.

It is like that.

It is like that.

I wonder what was going on there at first, and then I thought, no, that's great acting.

It is.

Brilliant.

So what has gone wrong out east?

What has gone wrong is this, that Conrad has thrown 600,000 men into action, but not enough.

And they don't have enough good guns, and the Russians have completely steamrolled them.

So Lviv had fallen on the 3rd of September, occupied by General Alexei Brusilov's 8th Russian Army, and that's just the beginning.

Further north, the Russians are absolutely battering the Austrians at a place called Ravaruska.

And so by the 9th of September, the Austrians are facing total and utter disintegration.

And the next day, the 10th, General Conrad drove out himself to the front line with the Archduke Karl, the heir to the Austrian throne.

So they went to a place called Grodek.

This was very unusual for Conrad because usually he's behind the lines.

And he was absolutely horrified by what he found, the total chaos.

And one thing above all, in Grodek, there were six bodies hanging in the main square.

Two of them accused of betraying Austrians to the enemy and the others for robbing the dead and the wounded on the battlefield.

So very sort of a very kind of haunting scene.

Conrad goes up to the highest ridge to survey the battlefield and even he can, with his optimism, can see that the Russians are about to break through.

So the following night, the 11th, he gives the order to fall back behind the river San, which is one of the rivers in in sort of southeastern Poland.

And the next day, the Austrians began to retreat.

And the same day, you know, perfect timing, the clouds open, the rain starts coming down.

Tom, the heavens are weeping for the Habsburg Empire.

And presumably for Conrad's relationship with Gina, because she's not going to be impressed by this at all, is she?

Well, the news actually gets much worse for Conrad.

Five days after he'd given the order to retreat, his adjutant came into his office looking very, very stricken.

And Conrad said, what?

Bad news, more bad news than the front, really?

And the adjutant said, it's actually a personal matter for you, sir, kind of concerning your son.

And Conrad said, oh, no, please tell me he's not badly wounded.

And the adjutant said,

no,

it's worse than that.

So Conrad's youngest and his favourite son, who was called Herbert, was a lieutenant in the dragoons.

and he had been killed at Ravaruska.

And Conrad says to the adjutant, can you leave me a minute?

and for an hour he wept and then he washed his face and he straightened his uniform and he went back to work as though nothing had happened but everybody said that after this he was basically a broken man a kind of withdrawn and broken man but he doesn't lose his job he carries on running the austrian army and even before that he'd been melancholy hadn't he because there was that that war war war

yeah exactly His misery must be even greater.

Yeah, he doesn't lose his job.

He carries on making decisions, which unfortunately is disastrous for the Austrian cause do you think anyone could have uh stabilized the situation they're massively up against it i was thinking about this actually when i was doing the notes because you know i'm quite austrophile you are yeah which is why i've been surprised by these two episodes because they haven't come out of it well no and i and i think see i don't blame the austrians for starting the first world war i think any serious power faced with the murder of their heir

clearly with the connivance of a country that's basically trying to destabilize them.

You know, the United States, France, whoever, they're always going to respond.

However, the irresponsibility is to respond when basically you don't have the capacity to beat anybody.

The Austrians couldn't even beat Serbia.

The lack of seriousness of Conrad and the other generals, basically, in starting all this.

I mean, ignoring Russia is mad, isn't it?

Totally.

It was ridiculous.

And you can say, well, it's a result of their tunnel vision or their paranoia or their fear of, you know, disintegration or whatever.

But even so, to just be in such a massive spasm of panic that you basically press the suicide button is insane.

Because actually, just this, I I mean, I was going to talk about this anyway, but this is a perfect link.

Look at what happened to their army.

Almost a million men had marched north against the Russians and fewer than two-thirds of them return.

100,000 of them are taken prisoner, 250,000 killed or wounded.

And as they return,

you made the zombie apocalypse analogy.

The Austro-Hungarian army that marches back to Pashimishel is just an absolute horde of zombies stumbling through the dust.

They've all got typhus or cholera.

Some of the regiments have lost all all their officers, more than half their men.

They've all got diarrhea.

They haven't washed for weeks.

They're in shock.

They're humiliated.

And in the dust behind them, they're leaving this trail of dying horses and dead men.

So they get back to this city.

And then Conrad says, right, we will...

withdraw.

We'll go back into the Carpathian Mountains.

However, we have to stop the Russians from following us.

Because if the Russians get into these mountains and they secure the passes and they go down the other side, they'll be into the Hungarian plain, they'll be heading straight for Budapest.

And then it's kind of game over for the Austrian Empire.

And that would then be game over for Germany as well.

Do you think

Germany fighting on alone for a cause in which its main ally started the war is now out?

Yeah, hard to see how that.

I mean, that could be the end of the First World War, I think, very plausibly.

Conrad says, right, we have to stop them.

And the place that we stop them is obviously this citadel, Zhemislu, which we have built for this purpose.

So I'm going to leave behind 130,000 men, orders to hold the fortress at all costs.

Now, these are not crack units.

These are the dregs that he's leaving behind.

They're the reserves.

They're men in their late 30s and early 40s.

Most of them are Hungarian, Polish, or Ukrainian peasants.

But they're officers, Tom.

They're the worst people in the world.

And I quote, academics, businessmen, and middling state officials.

I don't know.

If you want a heroic defense of a fortress against Russian hordes, those are exactly the people I turn to.

When I look at Britain's academics, I can see I see

men of high-end resolution and will.

Anyway, yeah, so this is who's going to defend the Austrian Empire.

So in the next few days, they make their preparations.

Here's an interesting sign of the disintegration of the empire.

They say we're going to clear all the villages around the perimeter.

Now, the people who live in these villages are Ukrainian peasants.

And they basically say to these guys, you've got to clear out.

They tell them at bayonet point, you've got to clear out.

If you don't clear out, we're going to blow up your village or burn it to the ground.

And actually, by this point, the soldiers are blaming those peasants for their own defeat.

They say these Ukrainians are no good.

They're traitors.

They've been helping the Russians with flags.

They've been sending smoke signals to the Russians.

This, I think, is not true.

But it's a sign of how, like as we've said before, diversity is not the Austro-Hungarian Empire's strength at all.

It's something that we often celebrate in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, you know, when people write these sort of...

Yeah, it's brilliant if you're in a cafe debating psychology or economics, but it's less good if you have to defend a frontier.

Correct.

On the 17th of September, the first Cossacks appeared on the horizon.

This was the advance guard of General Brusilov's third Russian army.

Brusilov is the outstanding Russian general of the war.

He has yet another absolutely colossal moustache.

But does he have breathing problems?

No, he breathes superbly.

He's got wonderful breath.

So that's what sets him above the crowd.

Correct.

He's a cavalryman.

He's half Polish, actually, Brusila.

I didn't know that.

Anyway, so he orders his field guns to start pummelling the city.

And when I say pummeling, I mean, they fired about 45,000 shells in four days, which is obviously terrifying if you're a civilian.

It was even worse for the people in these forts because they're very claustrophobic, these forts.

People in these kind of low tunnels and chambers.

Alexander Watson quotes a guy called Second Lieutenant Bruno Prochaska, who said it was like we were being pounded by a colossal battering ram.

He said, we wish we were outside, actually, in the trenches.

Death would be easier in the open air than in this cramped, suffocating box.

But actually, in the trenches, it's even worse.

The shells are kind of raining down on these guys.

He tells the story of an entire platoon, which was destroyed by just two shells.

The officers collapsed and shot.

He fainted in shock at seeing what had happened to the men.

One minute, the men are all standing there.

The next minute, the men have been blown into bits, and the bits are hanging from the trees all around them.

So really hideous.

Bloody shreds of flesh, intestine, and brain parts.

Yes.

Yeah.

I decided not to read that out, but you read it out, which is nice.

It's the hell of war, Dominic, and it's good to bring it home to people.

No, you're right.

And this terrible shell shock.

So, again, another story from the book, The Fortress.

There's a guy who's a corporal.

He's in his 30s.

He's the veteran of many battles, so he is brave.

He's dragged into the garrison hospital.

He's shouting, I want to go home.

And then he took all his clothes off.

He tore up his underwear.

Oh, my God.

He started singing hymns and then attacked the orderlies.

So he's like the governor of the the Bank of England in 1974.

Yeah, no, it wasn't the governor of the Bank of England.

It was the head of the civil service.

Head of the civil service.

Sir William Armstrong.

Yeah.

Completely acceptable behavior in Ted Heath's Britain, but not in First World War, Austria-Hungary.

Anyway, actually, when the Russians launched their ground attack, they didn't get anywhere.

They couldn't break through the trenches.

The Austrians did very well.

They put up a very plucky fight.

Some of these forts that they defended, they became kind of legendary.

There's a fort called I-Won.

And the defence there, I was mean about academics, but the defence was led by somebody called Dr.

Istvan Bieleck, who was a Budapest lawyer.

And he led this sort of Helms Deep style defense of this fort against the Crimean regiment, kind of hand-to-hand fighting until they can be relieved by more Hungarian troops.

So that's kind of good news for the Austrians.

And then they hear tremendous news from the north, because as we heard last time, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, the cracked detectives, have driven the Russians out of East Prussia at Tannenberg and at the Missourian lakes, and now they're moving south towards Warsaw.

So the Russians have to lift this siege and they move all their troops north to face the Germans.

So for the people of Zimischl, this is brilliant news.

And on the 9th of October, they are relieved by the Austrian field army, which has returned from licking its wounds.

So after a month, the siege appears to be over.

And you could ask, well, so what?

Does it matter?

In his book, The Fortress, Alexander Watson says, it absolutely does matter, because if the Russians had taken the fortress then, they would never have had a better chance to strike into the heart of the Habsburg Empire, get to Budapest, knock Austria-Hungary out of the war.

The war genuinely could have been over by Christmas.

But because they didn't take it, because these blokes, lawyers and whatnot, held out, the Russians have missed their best opportunity to bring the war to a speedy conclusion.

However, as we've said before, fortunes change ridiculously quickly on the Eastern Front.

So by late October, so after barely a month, the pendulum has swung again.

The Russians have just won two victories that nobody's ever heard of that we talked about last time, Tom.

The Battle of the Vistula and then the Battle of Wuj.

So now the Russians are heading towards Krakow and they're actually not that far from the German border.

These These are, by the way, are massive engagements.

A million people fought in these battles.

Insane, isn't it?

That nobody's ever heard of them.

I mean, I'm sure they have in Russia, but not here.

So now the Russians are back.

And now, yet again, the Austrians have to retreat.

Now, at this point, some of the officers in the fortress said, come on, we held out once, but we cannot handle a second siege.

We've run out, we don't have the supplies, we don't have...

And actually, since we've given the army time to rebuild anyway, what's the point?

Why don't we evacuate the city, evacuate the garrison, blow up the forts and cut cut our losses?

The problem is that the success of that first siege was the only victory for the Austrians worth celebrating in the early days of the war.

So it's become completely bound up with Conrad's personal prestige.

His only chance of basically

building up his reputation is to hold on to Pushimichul.

And

if he'd written it off, possibly he would have been sacked then.

And then it's goodbye marrying Gina.

So he says, right, right, I want you to prepare for another siege.

I'm sure you'll do brilliantly.

You know,

you were heroic and successful last time.

I'm sure you will be again.

The next day, however, the garrison's told you should write your farewell letters to your families.

That's not a good sign, is it?

Which I don't think inspires much confidence.

That same day, which is the 3rd of November, posters go up across the city telling all the civilians to get out.

Again, that's not a good sign.

No, and the police literally go door to door.

saying if you haven't packed, you know, get to the station.

Come on, just grab your essentials and get it.

Well, it's lucky that the Austrian Railway Service is performing heroically in these early months of the war, then, isn't it?

Because surely they've laid on loads of trains and there won't be a mad crush trying to get on the trains.

No, well, no.

So total pandemonium.

Not enough trains.

They have to leave behind 30,000 people.

And in his book, Catastrophe, Max Hastings tells an awful story about this woman who fights her way into this carriage with her three children.

She finally gets in the place in the carriage.

The train starts pulling out.

She breathes a sigh of relief.

She looks around.

She can see only two children just out the window.

On the platform, she can see the youngest child, her three-year-old son, standing there weeping in terror.

Oh, no.

All the time, the Russians are coming.

And by the 8th of November, they have encircled the fortress once again.

And now, to quote Alexander Watson, darkness descended over the conquered land.

So, Dominic, huge tension.

Can this great Austrian fortress withstand a second siege?

Will they be able to hold out or will the Russians break through?

And you mentioned how there are large numbers of Jews in this landscape and you've intimated that things don't turn out well for them.

So we'll hear about them too.

So come back after the break.

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Around eight o'clock in the morning the Cossacks arrived in Dembitsa.

The Jews who had already survived the initial agonies were gathered in the synagogues with their wives and children.

The Cossacks plunged into the Jewish houses with their horses and weapons, and what was not screwed down was smashed and flung on to the open street.

Like wild beasts they threw themselves on on the defenseless women.

Those who defended themselves were stabbed and trampled to death.

Spirited women plunged through windows, badly injuring themselves, but they too were not left alone by the monsters, and many died in the synagogue square in agonies of pain.

Then the synagogue street was set alight, and after a short while, a whole row of houses stood ablaze.

So, this is

not

from a record of 1940 or 1942.

It is from the autumn of 1914, and it is an eyewitness account of the Russian occupation of the town of Dembitsa, which was then in Galicia.

And Dominic, we've talked a lot about armies, about battles, about all of that, fluttering of flags, the piping of flutes, the fluttering of feathers in...

tyrolly in caps.

But what we haven't talked about is what all this means for ordinary civilians.

And I'm guessing nothing good.

Nothing good at all.

No, and it's actually a chance to talk about war aims and what people are wanting from the war.

So the Russians have come west with by far, I think, the most radical transformational agenda of any major combatant.

As soon as they got into Galicia, their new governor of the occupied territory, who was called Count Georgi Bobrinsky,

made this clear right away.

When he got into Lviv, he gathered all the local bigwigs and the bishops and he made a speech and he said, the lands of eastern Galicia are an eternal part of a single great Russia.

In these lands, the true population was always Russian.

Thus, the administration of this land should be based on Russian principles.

We'll introduce the Russian language, Russian law, and the Russian system.

Definite

resonances.

Yeah.

Now, this was very bad news for the Poles, the people who dominated the political and economic life of the towns of Galicia.

It was extremely bad news for the Ukrainians, because they were told, you don't exist.

Your church, your Greek Catholic church, your Ukrainian language, your separate Ukrainian, or as people would have said then, Ruthenian identity, all of these things, which interestingly had been not just tolerated, but often encouraged by the Austro-Hungarians as a counterweight to the Poles, all of these things will now be erased.

From now on, you are Russian, whether you like it or not.

Now, if it's bad for them, it is unbelievably bad for the third ethnic group in Galicia, which are the Jews.

Austria-Hungary was not exactly a paradise for Jews, because we talked before when we did the rise of Nazism about the influence of Vienna's mayor, Karl Luger, on Hitler, this kind of populist anti-Semitic mayor.

But isn't part of that because there is a resentment of Jews in Vienna, say, who have done incredibly well?

Yes.

So Freud, Mahler.

Massive cultural figures.

Jews are very prominent in the empire's high culture.

There's clearly a place for them.

in a multinational empire like the Habsburg Empire.

And they're very loyal to the dynasty.

So Franz Joseph had lifted a lot of the existing punitive laws against Jews.

Franz Joseph had made a pilgrimage effectively to Jerusalem.

He made a point of meeting Jewish leaders.

So there is, you know, there's clearly, Austria-Hungary is a relatively warm and welcoming home for if you're an Eastern European Jew.

The Russian Empire takes a very different approach to religious diversity.

Russia is comfortably the most anti-Semitic country in Europe at this point.

It's here in 1903, and it's no accident that conspiracy theorists faked the protocols of the elders of Zion.

I think the interesting thing about Russian anti-Semitism is that it's obviously partly rooted in history, but it's also a very modern phenomenon.

And a lot of historians say the reason it becomes so intense is that Russia is changing so much in the late 19th century.

Economic change, industrialization, urbanization.

A lot of people are losing out, and the Jews become scapegoats.

So from the 1880s in Russia, the harshest anti-Semitic laws in Europe, and then a wave upon wave of pogroms.

So Kiev in 1881, Kishinev very famously in 1903, Odessa in 1905, hundreds of people killed.

And this is why there are kind of waves of emigration, aren't they, coming to Britain and then even more to the United States?

Exactly.

So if you're, you know,

a Jewish...

villager or a townsman or whatever in 1914 in Galicia and you hear the Russians are coming, you are terrified.

And people have a particular dread of the Cossacks.

You open this half by doing a reading about the Cossacks, because the Cossacks see themselves as the defenders of Russian imperialism and Russian orthodoxy.

And they have a blood-soaked reputation.

They have been the shock troops in a lot of these pogroms.

And as we've heard, they completely live up to this horrendous billing.

As soon as they cross the frontier, there are stories about them attacking Jewish villages, looting shops, killing people, raping people, all of this.

And the very worst pogrom was in Lviv, the end of September.

It's a common story in the First World War that there'll be a rumor goes around, oh, our troops are being attacked by partisans or whatever.

So this is what happened in Lviv.

And there the Cossacks were given permission.

Their commander said, okay, the gloves are off.

You can go and punish people.

Do what you like.

And they ran amok, they slaughtered almost 50 people and they rounded up 300 people for deportation to the east.

It's not yet genocidal.

It's nothing, I think that would be a massive overstatement.

However, the direction of travel, I would say, is pretty ominous.

A lot of the Russian commanders are obsessively anti-Semitic.

The chief of staff, who's a guy called General Yanushkevich, is even by Russian standards, he's a pathological anti-Semite.

And so there's no effort made to moderate the violence at all.

In fact, officers will have Jewish people

they'll blackmail them, they'll loot their shops and houses, they have them whipped in the streets, hanged and so on.

And then in the spring of 1915, the Russians begin mass deportations, huge deportations of Jews to camps in the east.

So this is the shadow that is hanging.

This is the threat that awaits the people of Chemishel in the turn of 1914 into 1915.

Of course, the Russians haven't taken the city yet.

They have learned their lesson from the first seeds.

They're not going to do this kind of frontal attack.

They're going to starve the defenders out.

Now, the guy commanding the fortress is a man called General Kusmanek, who is a policeman's son from Transylvania.

He was an archive man, Tom.

He was a desk officer who had worked in the Austrian War Archive.

So we have laughed at the idea of academics and lawyers manning the defenses, but actually they're coming out of this tremendously well, aren't they?

It was a cheap shot, but irresistible, but maybe cheap nonetheless.

So this bloke does very well.

He says, you know, we're going to...

He runs the city

very smoothly under the circumstances.

He sets up soup soup kitchens for people who haven't got any food.

He gets nuns to cook hundreds of meals for them a day.

However, he's really up against it because the conditions are, it's your classic kind of siege conditions.

So piles of unburied excrement in the streets, disease rampant, drains overflowing, nothing to eat, all of this kind of thing.

You know, the stuff you would see in sieges going back to antiquity.

But there are some new elements.

So at the beginning of December, the 1st of December, people look up, they hear something in the sky above the city, and they see a plane and people come out actually to stare at it, to watch it.

And then they see these little grey balls falling out of the plane and somebody suddenly said, realizes what they are and shouts, they're bombs.

And then there's people running in panic and whatnot.

And this is one of the first instances in history of the aerial bombing of civilians.

So in all, the Russians launched 300 bombing raids on Pashirmishul.

They were hoping, I think, to hit the bridges.

But they don't, do they?

No, they miss.

I mean, just throwing a a ball out of a plane i mean it's never going to land where you think it's going to land however you know it's not comedy a dozen people were killed two dozen people were injured there's a story i think it's an alexander watson's account of a girl she had half her head cleaved off by shrapnel and had to be rushed twitching to hospital but the bombings as it always in history the bombings terrify and appall people but they don't sap their will to resist because people think well the russians are barbarians they're monsters to do this you know we can never give in to them so Christmas comes and the city is still under siege.

In Eastern Europe, the big day is Christmas Eve.

The defenders tried to put up trees and they were given special food, but it's all a bit sad.

Alexander Watson quotes this guy, Lieutenant Stanisław Gajak, and he says in his diary, I couldn't stop thinking about my wife and children.

The day was really difficult.

Even getting through it was so hard.

He gathers his kind of platoon or whatever to celebrate the holy day and everybody starts crying.

And then he had dinner with his fellow officers and they tried to light candles and sing carols but again they all start crying Mostovsky Stumpf the captain all quietly cried and this is the one moment in the story actually where the Russians belying their reputation behaved I think very well because when Austrian patrols went out of the city that day they found little parcels of bread and sausages and sugar in no man's land with cards wishing them a happy Christmas.

Oh that is nice.

And Alexander Watson quotes a lovely example.

Gallant knights, at so great a holiday as Christmas Eve, we wish you and your families the best and wish that you return healthy to your nearest and dearest.

We shall not disturb you on Christmas Day as you eat your supper and talk of your loved ones.

As a mark of our fraternal greetings, we break this holy wafer with you, your comrades outside the Siedliska forts.

I mean, that's quite sweet in a way, isn't it?

Yeah, so another Christmas truce on the Eastern Front as well as one on the Western Front.

Yeah, and as on the West and the Western Front, as soon as it's over, things get very dark indeed once we're into january they've run out of food inside the fort they basically start eating all their horses but they haven't got onto the rats yet they haven't got onto the rats no it's not quite the siege of leningrad in the second world war but unless something drastically changes shimmischel is doomed but you know what general conrad is is waiting in the wings for another crack he hasn't given up So he's going to come to the rescue.

And if there's one man you want to come to the rescue, it's this man with an unbroken track record of catastrophic failure.

Gandalf the White of the Eastern Front.

So his men have been holed up in the Carpathian Mountains.

They've been camping in heavy snow and driving rain.

They've all got frostbite and hypothermia.

Another commander might say, I'll let them rest a bit and thaw out before throwing them back into the fray.

But Conrad, as we know, is a born optimist.

So on the 23rd of January, he says, right, I want 175,000 men to go down out of the mountains, retake the mountain passes from the Russians, get down into Galicia, relieve the city.

By any standards, this is a big, a big ask, as people say.

And actually, what happens next is the Carpathian campaign.

Now, again, this is one of those things that I think in the English-speaking world, most people have no idea this ever happened.

I put my hand up.

I plead guilty.

It's one of the most horrific campaigns of the whole war.

So hundreds of thousands of Austro-Hungarians are trying to fight their way out of these mountains.

They're in snow blizzards.

The temperatures are below minus 20 degrees Celsius.

They don't have winter gear.

I mean, we talk about people having the wrong shoes, Tom.

A lot of them have got shoes made of paper.

Would you wear a paper shoe in a snow blizzard?

No, I wouldn't.

I did wear a pair of trainers that came to pieces when I walked up Mount Helvellin in the Lake District.

All right.

So you know exactly what they've been through.

And there was kind of sleet blowing in, and we ran into a squad of the SAS who told me off.

Yeah, they said, you're an idiot.

Look at your shoes.

Oh, no.

Which makes me ask,

why is their kit not better?

Because surely if anyone is used to alpine conditions, it's the Austrians.

It's a Tyraligan.

Kaiser Yeager.

Their shoes have rotted.

They've rotted and their supply networks have failed.

Haven't they got kind of nice ski gear?

They have not.

They have not.

Well,

I'll give you the proof of this.

After two weeks, they've lost two-thirds of their strength.

Some of them have been killed.

Some of them have died of disease, but loads of them have actually frozen to death in their their sleep.

Now, we began with your favourite regiment, didn't we?

The Tyrul Kaiser Jaeger.

The guys with the feathers.

They've been involved in this because they're freezing to death.

I mean, you'd think they'd be used to this in the Tyrrell book.

No.

And I mentioned Nick Lloyd's book on the Eastern Front.

He quotes one of their memoirs.

And would you like to read it, Tom, since you love them so much?

The scene was suffused with three colours.

The ashen white of the endless fields of snow.

The grave black of the endless mountain forests.

The blood red of the flames of battle.

The sky stretched boundlessly, mercilessly over the death and suffering of hundreds and thousands of soldiers.

The Carpathian front consumed men at an alarming rate.

It wore them down like a hammer, day in and day out, week after week, blow after blow, coming down on them with unceasing vigour.

So that is the worst ski holiday of all time, isn't it?

It is a terrible skiing holiday.

And actually, the blokes who are dying are not just from the Tyrol.

They're not just Austrians.

They are Hungarians.

They're Czechs, they're Poles, they're Croats, whatever.

And as every day passes, their faith in the army and their loyalty to the Empire and to the monarchy is just leaching away.

Of course it is, because they have been, as they say it, betrayed by their own commanders for a cause that seems to them baffling.

Now, meanwhile, back at the fortress, the people there are freezing too.

They don't have winter uniforms.

They've only got their summer gear.

They are these sort of ghostly, shrunken figures.

They're finishing off the horses now.

They're having to dilute their flower with birchwood.

They're collapsing every day with starvation.

25,000 men are in the hospital with hunger and exposure.

And the Russians are just pounding them the whole time with their heavy guns.

So by mid-March, Conrad finally has to accept defeat.

And he sends a message to the fortress and he says, you know, we're not coming.

Basically, you're doomed.

But then he says, very like Hitler at Stalingrad or something, Imperial honor demands that you don't surrender.

You should go down fighting.

And actually, this bloke, General Kuzmarnik, the archivist, says, fine.

And he actually cobbles together some assault troops and says, right, we'll do one last breakout.

This is a disaster.

They get lost in the snow.

The Russians basically unleash a storm of gunfire at them and they have to fall back into the fortress.

So on the 21st of March, Kuzmarnik convenes his senior officers and they all agree, there's no point going on.

Like, it's all over.

It's been months and we're not going to be relieved but they decide to go out literally with a bang they want to destroy everything of value before they surrender and make sure that the russians march into a ruined city so overnight they empty their guns at the russian lines sort of thunder of the guns people said was so intense that nobody could sleep and then at six o'clock the next morning the series of enormous explosions rip through these forts like people said it was like volcanoes erupting around the city huge great clouds of smoke and rubble raining down And then they blew up the bridges over the river San.

People said it was like the day of judgment, kind of pillars of fire and black smoke everywhere, and the earth torn open and all of this.

And at breakfast, Kuzmarnik sent a message to the Russians.

He said, I surrender the open city and await your command with no conditions.

And then at nine o'clock, the Russians marched into the center of this city.

Now, what happened to the defenders?

It's an interesting story.

120,000 men, masses, taken prisoner.

And these were just some of 2 million Austro-Hungarian

prisoners of war.

Yeah.

Mind-boggling.

2 million people.

I mean, so large that the numbers just cease to have any meaning.

Right, exactly.

You can't imagine.

What does it look like?

You can't even get your head around it.

Now, officers, by and large, were well-treated.

Remember when we did Peter the Great and the Great Northern War, what happened to the Swedes?

Yes.

It's actually the same story.

The officers tend to be well treated.

So Kuzmarnik ended up under house arrest in Kiev.

But the men, different story.

They were driven with whips by Cossacks to the railway stations and then packed into cattle trucks to go to camps in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

By the time they got there, many were dead from starvation or cold or whatever.

And in the camps, many thousands more died of malaria or typhus or dysentery.

And the very worst fate awaited Germans and Hungarians.

They were singled out.

A lot of them were sent to work on this railway line that was being built from Murmansk in the north, and that was transporting military supplies from Arctic convoys from Britain.

Okay, so this is again a kind of prefiguring of the Second World War.

Exactly, it is.

And they worked in the most horrendous conditions.

So they didn't even get to sleep in kind of huts.

They had to bury into the snow, like...

sort of carve out burrows in the snow to sleep.

If they faltered, they were whipped.

If they fell ill, they were denied food.

And basically, you know, you're finished.

And some historians say the conditions in this Murmansk railway were even worse in sort of 1915, 1916 or whatever, than in the gulags under Stalin.

It was kind of that.

And how many survive?

And what happens to them?

Well, thousands died.

I don't think there's exact figures.

So with all these casualty figures, there's no precise number.

I mean, some people ended up going home.

So the most famous prisoners of war to go back home were people called the Czech Legion.

So they ended up, I mean, they basically...

They became a factor in the Russian Civil War, fighting their way on these armored trains east.

Because the only way they could get back to Czechoslovakia, the newly created Czechoslovakia, was to go east all the way through Russia and then round the world.

And they ended up, you know, big being a kind of big faction in the Russian Civil War, which is bonkers.

But let's go back to the fall of the Citadel.

The news of Schirmichel's fall was front-page news across the empire, total shock.

Franz Joseph wept for two days because he knew that this was catastrophic for the image of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.

They'd pinned all their hopes on this place.

It was their pride and joy.

And now it had become a symbol of decay.

So this is a war that they started.

They've lost just in three months, the first three months of 1915, they've lost 800,000 men.

They're running out of offices.

And what is worse, when they lose Galicia in the northeast, a lot of their food came from

these kind of farmlands.

This is very bad news for the city people in Budapest and Vienna who depend upon the food supply from the east.

And what is more, hundreds of thousands of refugees, many of them Jewish, now flood into the sort of heart of the empire.

And as they, they are very unpopular in other parts of the empire, in Vienna and Budapest, but also in the small towns and villages in which they settle.

So there are all kinds of ethnic tensions piled on top of the existing ethnic tensions within Austria-Hungary.

And so as early as 1915, you can see the sort of sense of order breaking down.

And the Austrians' allies, the Germans, at this point start saying, well, they're finished.

They're done.

So the German liaison officer at the Habsburg military headquarters wrote to Berlin and he said, this empire is so rotten and so decayed, it can no longer be helped.

You know, even if we win the war, this empire is not going to last.

And what about Conrad?

And how does Gina take it?

Conrad is still going.

I mean, Conrad stays in office for another couple of years, I think, unbelievably.

And what Gina makes of all this...

not impressed i imagine probably not impressed but i think there's lots of censorship of course so she probably doesn't know what's going on conrad interesting you know who conrad blames for all this the jews no he blames the germans germans okay that's original he says uh they they could have given us more help I mean, I think he's being a tiny bit ungrateful because the Germans do give them, the Germans basically torch their own empire to help the Austrians and destroy their own monarchy.

So I think he's being a little bit ungrateful.

War, war, war.

That's what he said.

It's all you you care about, General Conrad von Hutzendorf?

Now, meanwhile, I mentioned the circling vultures last time, and I think I might use the same metaphor this time.

Well, they're having the notes.

Yeah.

So a month after the fall of this fortress, which of course is news around the world, the Italians sign a deal, a secret deal, to join the Entente.

And in return, they will get...

large swathes of Austria-Hungary, especially along the Adriatic, kind of Istria, Dalmatia.

And a month after that, Italy finally enters the war against Austria-Hungary.

And if you thought the Carpathian front was bad, the Italian front...

Oh, mad.

Absolutely mad.

Blowing the tops off mountains.

I've seen, I've walked through a great tunnel that the Italians dug out at the side of a mountain.

And I'm assuming that the Austrians did the same.

And it's all absolutely for nothing.

The two worst armies in history.

just killing yeah some amazing stories in this book the white war and one the one that always sticks in my mind is a whole load of italians like thousands of italians advancing up this sort of limestone scree mountain.

And the Austrians at the top of the machine guns shouting down, saying, please stop coming.

Like, we will kill you all.

Just go back.

Don't stop.

Don't come.

And the Italians keep going.

And the Austrians just say, well, okay.

And they kill them all.

Wow, you keep saying it's a terrible story.

I mean, we've already had terrible stories, but there are so many more to come.

So let's just end with the city, Shiemishul.

The chance to say it again one more time.

So a month after the city fell, Nicholas II turned up.

He went first to Lviv and then he went to this fortress and he toured the defences and all the people had been told, hang out Russian flags from your windows and all the schools had been told to mark the day and the children instructed on how to welcome their new emperor.

Nicholas, of course, is as sort of banal and puterish as ever.

He said he's found it very interesting and very picturesque.

But this trip really mattered because the authorities used it as a spur for Russification.

Nicholas used the opportunity to issue a proclamation.

There is no Galicia.

There is rather a great Russia to the Carpathians.

The people of Przemyshul were told, you must adopt Russian time, Russian customs, Russian festivals.

The shops must have signs in Cyrillic.

Polishness must be eliminated.

Polish elites deported.

And Ukrainian identity.

erased completely.

Ukrainian schools must now teach in Russian.

And what about the Jews?

Well, they pay the heaviest price of all.

Since January, the Russians have been deporting Jews eastwards, but in Chemishul they go further than anywhere else.

This is the most obvious example of deportation in the entire war.

In 10 days, they rounded up 17,000 people and transported them east.

And why are they doing that?

They don't want these lands to have any Jews in them.

They want to corral the Jews.

Is that for kind of ideological reasons or because they see the Jews as Austro-Hungarian sympathizers who can't be won over?

Both.

They don't like Jews anyway, but they know that the Jews are loyal to the Habsburg Empire and they want to get rid for that reason.

But to stress that first point, they don't like Jews anyway.

And many of these, they come with anti-Semitism as part of their intellectual repertoire.

So by May, there is not a single Jewish person left.

in this city.

So what happens to the Jews who are deported?

Some of them, I think, do get home because there are definitely Jews in Prezemeshel by the 1930s,

though not after the 1940s.

So some of them must have got back.

I don't actually know exactly how they did that.

But the irony of all this, it was all for nothing.

It really was all for nothing, because less than two weeks after the Tsar's visit, the Germans under August von Mackensen, and again, a bloat with the wrong name, launched a massive offensive.

in Poland,

smashed the Russians, scattered their armies.

The Germans went deep into occupied Galicia.

And on the 2nd of June, the Germans, in turn, marched into Chemischel.

One of their commanders afterwards said, the joy of the liberated people was indescribable.

Wherever we went, German soldiers were embraced and decorated with flowers and handed gifts.

And then he adds the killer line.

I didn't see any Austrian soldiers.

And that tells a wider story.

On paper, the Austrians are back and they've got their city back, but it's actually the Germans who have done it and the Germans who are the real masters now.

And the prestige and the legitimacy of the Habsburg Empire will never, ever be rebuilt.

And so that means that all these various lands with all their different peoples, their different languages, their different customs, that essentially the glue that had held them together is

going very, very rapidly.

And that, of course, has profound implications for what happens after the war, whether the central powers win or lose.

Completely.

I completely agree.

So in this story, you've seen a lot of elements of things we associate with the Second World War, racial ideology, deportations, ethnic cleansing, pogroms and stuff.

If you're Galician, these began in the 1910s.

But as you say,

since there is no rebuilding the multicultural society before the war, that means now the gloves are off and there's going to be a very, very bitter fight to see who controls it.

So this is what happens when the empire collapses in Peshemishul and its environs.

There's fighting between poles and ukrainians then it's caught up in the polish-bolshevik war then it's occupied by the nazis and tens of thousands of its jewish population murdered and and this is only kind of scratched the surface of all the horror that lies ahead okay so so there are better places to live in the 20th century basically pretty much anywhere yeah i mean that's why timothy snyder calls this area the bloodlands i think basically you want to live anywhere but here maybe not the congo so that that's a very cheery note dominic on which to end this series but i mean you know we are talking about

the world going up in flames, aren't we?

This is, yeah, we began this series by saying this is the great catastrophe, certainly for Europe, but you could also say for,

I mean, it is authentically a world war.

And I think this series has given

a flavor of why it's so terrible.

And of course, there is so much slaughter and misery and horror.

still to come.

God, you're really selling it.

Well, but having said that, having said that, we are going to be back this year with a little more First World War action.

And we're going to be back for our Christmas special.

We will be looking at the story of the festive truce on the Western Front, asking whether it happened, to what extent the story is true.

So a little touch of light.

And actually, when we do come back to the First World War, hopefully next year, I mean, there's so much to look forward to, Tom.

The Zeppelins, Gallipoli, the sinking of the Lusitania.

uh the the arrival of the italians um the wars fighting women lots of fun things and as always members of the Restus History Club will be able to get those episodes early, won't they?

Of course they will.

Why not sign up now at theresthistory.com?

Ready for next year.

Bed down.

But next week, something completely different because, Dominic, we will be leaving your backyard, the mountains and bogs and plains of Eastern Europe, and heading to Chatham High Street.

Long promised, long awaited, finally to be delivered.

And I know the excitement has been building for that.

But if you want to listen to it, that's fine.

But also, if you'd like to see it, because we've done it on location, you can see Chatham High Street in all its beauty and glory.

Yeah, you should watch it on YouTube because I have to say, when we did a filming day at Chatham High Street, I think I probably haven't laughed as much as that.

Not always for good reasons since I was about 12.

So definitely do watch it.

I think unmissable.

So we will see you then.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.