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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 were 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 Kaiserjäger Persevere, the heroic death of the 2nd Regiment of the Tyrolean Kaiserjäger 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 Jäger, an elite regiment, the Imperial Hunters with lovely sky blue uniforms and feathered hats.
Now, I've never had a soft spot for the Tyrolean Kaiser Jäger because I've never even heard of them.
But as I said in the previous episode, 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 Tyrolean 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 a 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 regiments, in particular the Tyrolean guys.
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 I only say that you will blaze all the more brightly.
That's kind of generosity.
I think it's the feathered hats that do it for us, isn't it?
So actually, yes, the Tyrolean Kaiserjäger had a terrible time in the 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 bonds that held the empire together.
Last time we talked about how the Austrians sought to wreak revenge on Serbia, and it became a humiliating rout for them.
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 Jäger.
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 Przemyśl.
What's it called?
It's called Przemyśl.
So this was the most formidable fortress of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and 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 by 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 Lodomiria.
Of course we are.
So today, eastern Poland, that's where Przemysl 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 Krakow, now in southeastern Poland.
The area had a very diverse population.
So about 45 each Polish and what was then 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, Zimishl.
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?
It's still called that.
It's still called Przemysl.
That's the Polish name.
And it was given an award by Volodymyr 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 its 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're 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 Zimzal 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 are 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, Przemyśl 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 national defence, national security.
And kind of a salient.
Yeah, salient, I guess.
Osgiliath.
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 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 Schemeschel 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 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 were 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, Conrad von Hützendorf, 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, firm and vigour, 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 that the troops can have lunch.
Before they even fire a shot, there are warning signs.
So at one point...
All these troops are going east and the station master, a place called Podborzha, 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.
One of his 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 and 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.
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 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 the different units have different uniforms?
Well, of course, different, yeah.
They've not all got feathered hats like the Tyrolean Kaiserjäger 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 Zimish, people have no idea.
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're here.
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 Przemysl 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 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 or 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 are broken down completely.
It is a bit of a zombie film.
And then there were 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.
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 600000 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 Rava Ruska.
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 a very haunting scene.
Conrad goes up to the highest ridge to survey the battlefield, and even he, 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 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.
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, more bad news in 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 favorite son, who was called Herbert, was a lieutenant in the Dragoons.
And he had been killed at Rava Ruska.
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 war, war, war.
Yeah, exactly.
And now 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 stabilised 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 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 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, 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 returned.
100,000 of them were taken prisoner, 250,000 killed or wounded.
And as they return, you know, you made the zombie apocalypse analogy.
The Austro-Hungarian army that marches back to Przemyśl 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 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 the 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 allies started the war and 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 the citadel Jemischl, 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'd turn to.
When I look at Brisson's academics, I see it. 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.
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, 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 sorts 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.
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, Bruce Elough.
I didn't know that.
Anyway.
So he orders his field guns to start pummeling the city.
And when I say pummeling, I mean they fired about 45000 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 fainted in shock, 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 a 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 thirties.
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 Bank of England in 1974.
It wasn't the governor of the Bank of England.
It was the head of the civil service.
Head of the civil service.
William Armstrong.
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-1.
And the defense.
There I was mean about academics, but the defense was led by somebody called Dr Istvan Bilek who was a Budapest lawyer.
And he led this sort of Helms Deep style defense of this fort against the Crimean regiments, 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 Bzimisz, 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 Lodz.
So now the Russians are heading towards Krakow, and they're actually not that far from the German border.
These are, by the way, a massive engagement.
A million people fought in these battles.
Insane, isn't it?
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.
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 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... you're building up his reputation, is to hold on to Pushyamishul.
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, I want you to prepare for another siege.
I'm sure you'll do brilliantly.
You were heroic and successful last time.
I'm sure you will be again.
The next day however, the garrison are 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.
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 into place in the carriage.
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 Dembitza.
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 onto the open street.
Like wild beasts, they threw themselves 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 Dembitza, 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, entirely 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.
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.
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, have 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 – there's clearly – Austria-Hungary is a relatively warm and welcoming home 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 antisemitism 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 coming to Britain and then even more to the United States.
Exactly.
So if you're 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 at 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.
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.
This 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 Shemeshul at 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 defences.
But actually they're coming out of this tremendously well, aren't they?
It was a cheap shot.
Irresistible, but maybe cheap nonetheless.
So this bloke does very well.
He says, you know, he runs the city very smoothly.
Under the circumstances, he sets up 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 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.
There's 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 strange 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 realizes what they are and shouts There are bombs and there are 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 Przemyśl.
They were hoping, I think, to hit the bridges.
But they don't, do they?
No, they miss.
How?
I mean, just throwing 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 in 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 always in history, the bombings terrify and appal people, but they don't sap their will to resist, because people think well, the Russians are barbarians.
They're monsters to do this.
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 Gajczak.
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.
We wish you 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 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 gone on to the rats.
No, it's not quite the Siege of Leningrad in the Second World War.
But unless something drastically changes, Shemeshul is doomed.
But you know what?
General Conrad 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.
The 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 frostbites 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 175000 men to go down out the mountains, retake the mountain passes from the Russians.
Get down into Galicia, relieve the city.
By any standards, this is 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 Helvellyn 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.
They told you?
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 Tyrolean Kaiser Jäger.
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 sleep.
Now, we began with your favorite regiment, didn't we?
The Tyrolean Kaiserjäger.
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 Tyrol, but no.
And I mentioned Nick Lloyd's book, 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 colors 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 vigor.
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 leeching away.
Of course it is because they have been, as they say, 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 flour with birch wood.
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 Kuzmanek, the archivist, He 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, Kozmanek convenes his senior officers and they all agree there's no point going on.
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.
The 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.
People said it was like volcanoes erupting around the city.
Huge, great clouds of smoke and rubble raining down.
And then they blow up the bridges over the River Seine.
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, Kuzmanik 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 the 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.
You can't compute it.
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 in the Great Northern War and what happened to the Swedes?
Yes.
It's actually the same story.
Yeah.
The officers tend to be well-treated.
So Kuzmanek 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 sleep in kind of huts.
They had to bury into the snow, sort of carve out burrows in the snow to sleep.
If they faltered, they were whipped.
If they fell ill, they were denied food.
Basically, 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 bad.
And how many survived?
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 used 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 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 Shemeshul'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 the first three months of 1915, they've lost 800,000 men.
They're running out of officers.
And, what is worse, when they lose Galicia.
In the northeast, A lot of their food came from these kind of farmlands.
So 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 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 happening, piled on top of the existing ethnic tensions within Austria-Hungary.
And so as early as 1915, you can see a 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.
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.
Blames the Germans.
Germans?
Okay, that's original.
He says they could have given us more help.
I mean, I think he's being a tiny bit ungrateful, because the Germans basically torched their own empire to help the Austrians 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 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.
Go for it.
Well, I have in 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 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.
It's an amazing stories in this book, the white war.
The one that was 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 gun 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, and they kill them all.
Well, 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, Shemeshul.
A 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 Przemysl 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 Shemeshul 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 antisemitism as part of their intellectual repertoire.
So by May, there is not a single Jewish person left in this city.
And what happens to the Jews who are deported?
Some of them, I think, do get home, because there are definitely Jews in Przemysl 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 and August von Mackensen arrived and again a bloke 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 and in turn, march 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've done it, and the Germans who are the real masters now.
And the prestige and the legitimacy of the Habsburg Empire will never, ever fade. 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 of 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 Przemysl 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.
And this is only kind of scratched the surface of all the horror that lies ahead.
Okay.
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's a very cheery note, Dominic, on which to end this series.
But we are talking about the world going up in flames, aren't we?
We began this series by saying this is the great catastrophe, certainly for Europe.
But you could also say, 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.
Gosh, 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.
It's on Zeppelins Gallipoli, the sinking of the Lusitania, the arrival of the Italians, the wars fighting women, lots of fun things.
And as always, members of the Rest is History Club.
We'll be able to get those episodes early, won't they?
Of course they will.
Why not sign up now at therestofhistory.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.
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.
Hey, it's Anthony Scaramucci from the Restless Politics U.S.
If you're looking for something to play next, Katty K and I just launched a new miniseries about Ronald Reagan.
We're digging into the real Reagan story the rise, the drama, how his world has been turned upside down in the age of Trump.
We trace his rise from Hollywood to the White House, from his role in ending the Cold War to reviving the economy.
And we also confront those scandals Iran-Contra, his assassination attempt and his failure around the AIDS epidemic.
Just search The Restless Politics U.S. wherever you get your podcasts.
Here's a clip from the series.
Ronald Reagan knew how to go big and go bold.
He truly was the great communicator.
Together, we're going to do what has to be done.
He regrounded the GOP and conservative principles.
Free markets, more government, and an unshakable faith in American exceptionalism.
Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
Ronald Reagan shook the country.
People keep looking to government for the answer, and government's the problem.
President Reagan was shot in the chest by a gunman outside the Washington Hotel.
We did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages.
Uncomfortable as it is to admit, the 40th president inadvertently prepared the ground for the 45th.
It's not Reagan's party anymore.
Donald Trump destroyed Ronald Reagan.
I thought he was great, his style, his attitude, but not great, Andre.
Will we be the party of conservatism?
Or will we follow the siren song of populism?
Only one man has the proven experience we need. together we'll make America great again.
Thank you very much.
We hope you enjoyed that clip.
To hear the full series, just search The Rest Is Politics US.
