"Machen Sie Ordnung!" ["Put matters in order"] was the phrase used by
Austrian officers in Serbia when they wished a non-commissioned
officer to see that such and such Serbian civilians should be hanged
or shot. Occasionally an accident occurred, as when a priest near
Vi[vs]egrad came to an officer with the request that his plum trees
should be spared, since he had nothing else. This officer intended to
be kind and, not knowing or forgetting the sense in which those three
words were being used, he said to a sergeant, "Machen Sie Ordnung!"
and the next morning a prominent citizen of Split, Count Pavlovi['c],
whose post in the Austro-Hungarian army was that of a provost-marshal,
saw the priest, his wife and his three little boys hanging from the
plum trees. It was and is the fashion to assert that the Austrian army
was incomparably less brutal than the Prussian, so that some readers
will be disinclined to believe a conversation which Count
Pavlovi['c], particularly as he is a Yugoslav, once had at Donja Tusla
in Bosnia with a certain Captain Waldstein, who between 9 a.m. and 1
p.m. had sentenced nineteen people to be hanged. These people, by the
way, were all over twenty years of age, so that each case had to be
tried; persons under that age could, as we have seen, also be hanged,
but not as the result of a trial. Pavlovi['c] approached the
captain--his rank, to be accurate, was captain-auditor--and asked him
how he had lunched after such a morning's work. "I felt," was the
reply, "as if I had drunk nineteen glasses of beer." An Austrian army
surgeon, Dr. Wallisch, who during the occupation travelled
professionally in Serbia and wrote a good deal about it in Viennese
papers and Austrian papers in Belgrade, said that "everywhere in this
Balkan and patriarchal environment you see educational mansions and
spacious barracks.[80] Does not this, better than anything else, show
the criminal, premeditated hostility of the Serbs against our
Monarchy? They have the longing to learn, which devours the ambitious,
and likewise the wish to realise by force of arms this fantastic ideal
of an over-excited national sentiment." Yes indeed, this was the ideal
of King Peter, in accordance with the device of the poet, Aksentie
Teodosijevi['c]: "Towards liberty, in the first place through learning
and culture, then with arms." Very few people would be inclined to
believe that the invading Austrians could be so petty as to burn all
the schoolbooks they came across, and still fewer would credit the
fact that Yugoslav patients with gold-filled teeth ran any special
risk in Austrian army hospitals. Ivo Stani[vs]i['c] of the Bocche di
Cattaro had fought with the Montenegrins and, in consequence of
Nikita's capitulation, had fallen into the Austrians' hands. He was
warned by his friends not to go into hospital, where his twelve gold
teeth, which he had acquired in the United States, might prove his
undoing. He did, as a matter of fact, die there, and the overdose of
morphia--witnessed by the well-known architect, Matejorski of
Prague--may have been accidental, and the Austrians who took his teeth
out may have thought it foolish to leave so much gold in a corpse.
Another Bocchesi who underwent the same treatment was one Risto
Lije[vs]evi['c]. Perhaps the Austrians do not deny these incidents,
and considering the trouble which they gave themselves to have a long
series of open-air brutalities officially photographed and made the
subject of picture postcards, one presumes that the dental operations
were omitted on account of the bother of indoor photography. The
postcards, of which I have a large collection, place on record the
procedure used in the wholesale hanging and shooting of Bosnian and
Serbian civilians, young and old, men and women. More trouble was
taken over the photographs, which are sometimes minute and sometimes
artistic in depicting a row of gallows on an eminence with gloomy
clouds behind them, than was taken with the manufacture of these
gallows, for in many cases they were no more than a seven-foot stake,
to the top of which the victim's throat was firmly fastened, holding
his or her feet a short distance from the ground. We have in the
London Press and in the House of Lords a number of reactionary persons
who do not cease regretting the disappearance of Austria-Hungary. The
new States, such as Yugoslavia and Czecho-Slovakia, they argue, are
very unsatisfactory, if only for the reason that they substitute a
lower civilization for a higher. Austrian culture, in their opinion,
is so different from that of the new States that you cannot compare
them. And when they talk of the Habsburg dynasty it is after the
fashion of old Francis Joseph who, in 1891, when the four hundredth
anniversary of the great Czech teacher Comenius was being officially
celebrated in all the schools of Prussia, commanded that nothing of
the sort was to be done in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, because his
attention had been drawn by Archbishop Schwarzenberg of Prague to a
Latin letter in which the great man uttered some sharp words
concerning the dynasty. One is prepared to overlook a great many
things which happened in the stress of war, but the postcards which
portray fashionably dressed women and girls strolling between the
gallows as if at a garden party and merely using their parasols
against the sun, do not appear to leave any attributes for a
civilization lower than that which they exhibit. The Bosniaks and
Serbs who were thus done away with were frequently even less to blame
than those ignorant peasants who, being told by their priests that
Peter was their King, shouted "Long live King Peter!" as the Austrian
troops marched through their villages, and were forthwith hanged for
high treason. "Whenever," says Euripides, "I see the wicked fall into
adversity I declare that the gods do exist." At Trnovo twenty-eight
were executed, including two women and at Pale, near Sarajevo,
twenty-six, the Austrians killing all the old folk and the children
who remained when the Montenegrin and Serbian armies retreated. Those
who were not murdered on the spot had a period of imprisonment during
which they were fed on white bread; but all that they were asked,
prior to their execution, was their name, their father's name and
their domicile. Thousands were interned--at Doboj between twenty and
thirty died every day of illness or of famine. The fate of the
abandoned children in Bosnia was such that when Dr. Bilinski, the
Governor (afterwards Minister of Finance in Poland) was told of it he
had the decency to weep. His informant was Madame ['C]uk of Zagreb, so
well known to British travellers; this lady was at the head of an
organization which removed as many children as possible from Bosnia to
other parts of the Dual Monarchy. The diet of grass, cow's dung and a
kind of bread, chiefly composed of clay and wood-shavings and the bark
of trees, gave to nearly all the children a protruding stomach; they
were so weak that they would fall out of the luggage-racks of the
railway carriages, and with 500-600 children in three waggons it was
necessary to deposit some of them in the racks. At a place called
Sunia it was the ladies' custom to have cauldrons of maize and water,
as well as bacon, waiting for the travellers, but very often this food
brought on a colic, so unaccustomed were the children to fats.[81] If
the Austrians intended to put their Bosnian house in order by
finishing off the population--"Machen Sie Ordnung"--they made
considerable progress. They had hoped, before the War began, to send a
punitive expedition into Serbia that would finish off that insolent,
small country. Delirious was the enthusiasm of the Viennese at the
declaration of War. Fate was giving them the whitest of bread before
their execution.
The Austrian statesmen did not embark on the War without taking
certain precautions. Count Berchtold, on July 28, submitted for the
old Emperor's signature the war declaration, which explicitly stated
that the Government was forced to protect its rights and interests by
recourse to arms, the more so as the Serbian troops had already
attacked the Imperial and Royal soldiers at Temes-Kubin on the Danube.
After the Emperor had signed the declaration of war in this form,
Count Berchtold struck out the reference to a fight at Temes-Kubin,
and sent a letter to Francis Joseph explaining that he had taken it on
himself to eliminate this sentence as the reports had not been
confirmed. "It is clear," said the _Arbeiter-Zeitung_,[82] commenting
on the Austrian Red-book which revealed this affair, "it is clear that
the fight at Temes-Kubin never occurred, but was simply invented by
Count Berchtold. That arch-scoundrel not only deceived the people, but
also the Emperor. The destiny of the world depended upon whether an
eighty-four-year-old man permitted himself to be deceived. For such a
crime Berchtold must certainly be sent to prison, or, more justly, to
the gallows."
If the punitive expedition into Serbia had been less disastrous, it
would perhaps have been accompanied with less barbarity--though the
Austrian army was handicapped, owing to the large number of
aristocratic, and presumably more gentle, officers who found
themselves unable to leave the War Office and similar institutions in
Vienna. Yet the Austrians seem to have determined how to act before
they came. A special branch of the army occupied itself with the
stealing, packing and dispatching of cameras, engravings, ladies'
garments, etc. etc.--numerous lists were accidentally left behind in
Belgrade, and every sheet at the top left-hand corner was stamped
with the words "Sammlungs-Offizier" (_i.e._ Collection-officer). I do
not know what knowledge and what skill are necessary before this
rubber stamp is conferred upon a man. Did the Imperial and Royal
authorities regard him as a non-combatant? The "Sammlungs-Offizier"
might resent such a classification if in private life he had been a
courageous burglar. And the Imperial and Royal army, according to
certain "Instructions for the conduct of troops" which were found on a
wounded officer of the 9th Army Corps, had resolved--irrespective of
success or failure in the War--to massacre the Serbs without
compunction: "Any person encountered in the open, and especially in a
forest, must be regarded as a member of a 'band' that has concealed
its weapons somewhere, which weapons we have not the time to look for.
These people are to be executed if they appear even slightly
suspicious"; and another paragraph says that "I will not allow persons
armed, but wearing no uniform, whether encountered singly or in
groups, to be taken prisoners. They must be executed without
exception." The Austrians knew very well that the Serbs had not
received their new uniforms, and that at least one-third of their army
was obliged to take the field in ordinary peasant's dress.[83] The
fact that the Austrian invasion of north-western Serbia came to such
an ignominious end before September is no reason why so large a number
of women, children and old men were, as is very well authenticated,
cut to pieces, burned alive, despoiled of their eyes, their noses,
disembowelled, and so forth. One expects a certain amount of licence
from the baser elements of an invading army; but in Serbia--perhaps
because this was a punitive expedition--it seems to have been the
Imperial and Royal officers who egged on their men.... I have tried,
from the Austrian records, to ascertain whether any comparable
outrages can be laid at the door of the Serbs. And there is one
incident which utterly disgraces some of their Montenegrin brothers:
the men of Fo[vc]a in Herzegovina joined the Montenegrin army when it
penetrated to the neighbourhood of Sarajevo. When it was thrown back
the Fo[vc]a comrades--Yugoslavs, of course, and guilty of high treason
against Austria--accompanied them to Montenegro; and later on some
Montenegrin officers denounced the people of Fo[vc]a to the Austrians,
with the result that fourteen of them were hanged.
On August 24, 1914, after twelve terrible days, the Austrians were
dislodged from [vS]abac and flung across to the northern bank of the
Save. More useful to the Serbs than their 6000 prisoners were the 50
cannons and over 30,000 rifles, for the Serbian troops had entered the
War with such scanty equipment that many of the regiments with an
effective strength of over 4000 men possessed only 2500 rifles. The
armed soldiers went into action, while the unarmed waited in reserve,
springing forward as their comrades fell, and taking up the weapons of
the fallen to continue the fight. Here occurred an incident of which
the hero was a boy. He had run away to the army and, to his vast
delight, been made a standard-bearer. When an officer perceived that
he was continuously exposing himself he told him to hide. "No one will
see you," said the officer. "But," answered the boy, "the flag will
see." And he was killed. Many of the dead or wounded Austrians were
Southern Slavs who had not been able to surrender to their brothers;
they were often found with all their cartridges intact, and with their
rifles made incapable of shooting.