Austro-Hungarian soldiers marching through a city, their officers bawling orders. Women and a child watch and talk, possibly shouting to be heard over the marching feet. An original watercolor on blue paper, signed W. Rittermann or Pittermann, December 26, 1915.
signed W. Rittermann or Pittermann, December 26, 1915.
"In 1914, 3,500,000 [Austro-Hungarian] men were called up — virtually the whole of the trained reserve, and a section of the untrained territorial army. Losses knocked out a substantial proportion of these — to the end of 1914, 1,250,000, and a further 800,000 to March 1915. . . . The army at the front therefore ran down — not much above 250,000 in December 1914, and not 500,000 in April 1915. . . . in spring 1915 there was a severe manpower crisis."
In eight months of war, Austria-Hungary's Chief of the Austro-Hungarian General Staff Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf had overseen three invasions of Serbia that had come to naught with the loss of 200,000 men. He had lost Galicia and Bukovina, Austria-Hungary's northeastern provinces. With German help, he had regained some of the lost territory, but not the fortresses at Przemyśl, where the Russians took over 100,000 men prisoner, and Lemberg. His winter offensive against Russia in the passes of the Carpathian Mountains had cost him another 800,000 men. Without the aid of Germany, without his forces being augmented by German troops, without his men being led by German officers, he could do little.
The Eastern Front, 1914-1917 by Norman Stone, pp. 122, 123, copyright © 1975 Norman Stone, publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons, publication date: 1975
1915-03-31, 1915, March, Austro-Hungarian Army, K.u.K. Army, KuK Army
