The Rest Is History - 599. The First World War: Downfall of the Habsburgs (Part 6)

Episode Date: September 10, 2025

After endeavouring to wreak their revenge on Serbia, what would be the greatest hammer blow to the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the First World War? With Leviv having fallen apocalyptically to the Russian hordes, what had gone so wrong? How might the war have been brought to an end before Christmas of 1914? And, with the darkness gathering around the Austrian defences, could the great fortress of Przemyśl hold out against the Russian barrage for a second time…? Join Dominic and Tom as they discuss the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Russian advance, on the brutal Eastern front, as the first year of the First World War grinds bloodily on… Join The Rest Is History Club: Unlock the full experience of the show – with exclusive bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to every series and live show tickets, a members-only newsletter, discounted books from the show, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at therestishistory.com For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett + Aaliyah Akude Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest is History. For weekly bonus episodes, add free listening, early access to series and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to the rest is history.com and join the club. That is the rest is history.com. This episode is presented by Adobe Express, the quick and easy create-anything app. What does that mean? Well, say you need to make a presentation or a video or a social media post or a flyer to some, certainly to me, that sounds intimidating. But Tom, with Adobe Express's intuitive features like templates, generative AI and real-time collaboration, it has never been easier. Adobe Express. Try it for free. Search Adobe Express in the App Store.

Wendy's most important deal of the day has a fresh lineup. Pick any two breakfast items for $4. New four-piece French toast sticks, bacon or sausage wrap, biscuit or English muffin sandwiches, small hot coffee, and more. Limited time only at participating Wendy's Taxes Extra. I'm Chris Hadfield, astronaut and citizen of planet Earth. Join me on a journey into the systems that power the world. No politics, just real conversations with real people shaping the future of energy. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. 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 heating 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 of 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 Yeager, Persevere, the heroic death of the second regiment of the

Tyrolean Kaiser Yeager 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 Dominant, you have written, we've always had a soft spot for the Tyrolean, Kaiser Yeager, 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 Yeager, 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 Turillian Kaiser Yeager? 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 of history, You used to talk to me about the second regiments in particular of the Tyrolean Kaysiaga. 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. Generosity. I think it's the feathered hats that do it for us, isn't it? So actually, yes, the Tyrolin Kayser Yeager 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. So last time we talked about how the Austrians sought to reap revenge on Serbia, and it became a humiliating route for them and the bloke in charge, General Pottyurek, 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 Therleyan Kaiser Yeager. 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 Pshimishl. What's it called? It's called Shiemischel. 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. and then 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, but I tell you, they were in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomiria.

Of course we are. So today, Eastern Poland, that's where Bashimichel is, very close to the Ukrainian border. Now, at the time, this was Austria's most northeastern province. 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 is Leviv, and the other is Krakoff, 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, Jemichel.

I love hearing you say that. 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 Jemischel. That's the Polish name. And it was given an award by Vladimir 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. and 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. Yeah. But there was also a garrison of about 10,000 men for a couple of reasons. First of all, because Jemish 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 Carpavians, 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, Pradeshul had been designated as a fortress city, so it was designated as the cornerstone of Austria-Hungary's eastern defences. So it's kind of 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, salians, 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 Shemichel 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 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 Hudsondorf, who is basically He started a world war in order to impress his mistress, Gene of Unrininghouse, 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, Tim and Vigo, 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, said the troops can have lunch.

Before they even fire a shot, there are warning signs. So at one point, they're all these troops going east, and the station master at a place called Pold 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 will 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 had one of his just top monkeys. Because he never made a mistake, paid him beer, ran the South African railways for years. Yeah. He was brilliant. And for those who may have missed that episode, and we'd 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't 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 to go. It's 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 checks and they'll start shooting to 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're not all got feathered hats like the Tira and Kaiser Yeager, where they're scar. 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 Jemish, 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 Shemichel 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 Liviv. Leviv 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, Leviv 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 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 Leviv have completely gone down because Galicia's capital, LeViv, has fallen to the Russians. Hello, hello, can you hear me? Can you hear me? Exactly 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, Leviv 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 base called Ravarouska. 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 Grodeck. 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 Grodeck, 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 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 sort of south-eastern 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, told, 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. Conrad said, what, 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

favorite 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 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 stabilized the situation? They must be up against it. I was thinking about this actually when I was doing the notes. Because, you know, I'm quite ostracile.

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. I think any serious power... Faced with the murder of their air, clearly with the connivance of a country that's basically trying to destabilise them. You know, the United States, France, whoever, they're all 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 is ridiculous. And you can say, well, it's a result of their tunnel vision or the 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, 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. A hundred thousand of them were taken prisoner, 250,000 killed or wounded. And as they return, you know, you made the zombie apocalypse analogy. The Austro-Hum, Hungarian army that marches back to Prishimishal 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 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 plane, 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,

start at the war is now out. It's 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, Jemichel, 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 there.

The reserves, their 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 Brissons' academics, I 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. Let's 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, 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 Brousseloff'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. It's half Polish, actually, Bruselof. 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 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 at 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 there's 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 Bank of England in 1974. No, it wasn't the governor of the bank of England. It was the head of the civil service.

So 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 fault called I-WOM. And the defence there, I was mean about academics, but the defence was led by somebody called Dr. Istvan Belek, who was a Budapest lawyer. and he led this sort of Helms-deep-style defence 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 Ludendorf, the cracked detectives, have driven the Russians out of East Prussia at Tannenberg and at the Missyrian 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 Jemischl, 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 has ever heard of that we talked about last time, Tom, the Battle of the Vistula, and then the Battle of Wudge. 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, that nobody's ever heard.

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 up. 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 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 know, building up his reputation, is to hold on to Pushimishol. And he, if he'd written it off, possibly he would have been sacked then, and then it's good by 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 told you should write your farewell letters to your families.

That's not a good sign, is that? 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 in the 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. This episode is brought to you by Uber. Now, do you know that feeling when someone shows up for you when you need it most. We all need that sometimes, and Uber knows it.

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Now, Thomas, you know, in the Middle Ages, it could take you years if you're a monk to create a manuscript. You'd have to copy it out word by word. And then after all that, the margins would be ready. And you'd put all kind of decorative elements and all kinds of gills and stuff in the margins. And it would look fantastic. So it might take often years to finish, but the finished product would then last for centuries. And that is pretty much what the folio. Society does today, only, of course, with slightly less parchment and fewer quills. Yes,

the Folio Society takes some of the greatest works ever written, things like George Orwell's 1984, or the quests in J.R. Tolkien or Frank Herbert's June, and their team of editors and designers and artisans, they craft books that are so beautiful. They're like works of art in their own right. So each one is carefully designed with slipcases, award-winning, illustrations and covers that honor the stories inside. It doesn't just protect them. So if like me and like Tom, you think that a book should look as good as it reads, then the Folio Society very much speaks your language. Explore the world's most love stories in the most beautiful form, only at foliosociety.com. That is foliosociety.com. This episode is brought to you by Square.

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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 a light 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 Dembitzer, 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 Terylian 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 them, 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 Leviv, 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 polls. 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 Nuger, 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, Marla. 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 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 who are losing. out and they, 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, Kishenev very famously in 1903, Adessa 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 village. 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 were stories about them attacking. Jewish villages, looting shops, killing people, raping people, all of this. And the very worst pogrom was in Leviv 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 Leviv, 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 Yanushkiewicz, 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 black, 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 Shemichel 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 seats. 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, this 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, 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 suit 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 siege is 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, watch it, and then they see these little gray balls falling out of the plane, and somebody suddenly realizes what they are and shouts.

They're bombs, and there are people running in panic and whatnot. 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 Shemishel. They were hoping, I think, to hit the bridges. But they don't, do they? No, they miss. 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 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 is always in history, The bombings terrify and are poor 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 into 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 Staniswof Gajach. And he says in his diary, I couldn't stop thinking about my wife and children. The day was 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 sink 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 nights, at so great a holiday as Christmas Eve, we wish you and your family is the best, and wish 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 on to the rats yet. They haven't got onto the rats.

No, it's not quite the Sieger-Leningrad in the Second World War. But unless something drastically changes, Shemichel 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. 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 Comrade, 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 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 to 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. I thought 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 Helvallin in the late 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, 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 Yeager. Their shoes are rotted. They've rotted and their supply networks have failed and

haven't they got kind of a 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 Tyroly and Kaiser Yeager. 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 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 ash and 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 bigger. 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, their Czechs, their Poles, their 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, 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 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 or 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. It 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, were so intense that nobody could sleep. And then at 6 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 blew up the bridges over the river sand. And 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 sum of two million Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war. Yeah, mind-boggling. Two 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 in the Great Northern War and what happened to the Swedes? It's actually the same story. 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 to 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 know, you're finished. And some historians say the conditions in this Mermansk Railway were even worse. in 1915, 1916 or whatever,

than in the gulags under Stalin. And how many survived? 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. Some people ended up going home.

So the most famous prisoners of wars to go back home were people called the Czech Legion. So they ended up, I mean, 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 Czech, Slovakia, 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 Shemichel'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 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 as 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. of sense of order breaking down. And the Austrian's allies, the Germans, at this point, starts 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. 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 do. 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 of ungrateful. War, war, war. That's what he said. It's all do you care about, General Conrad von Hudsondorf. Now, meanwhile, I mentioned the circling vultures last time, and I think I might use the same metaphor this time, what 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, 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 of 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 amazing stories in this book, The White War. The one that 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 and 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. 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. Sheemishel, a chance to say it again one more time. So a month after the city fell, Nicholas the second turned up. He went first to Leviv 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 putterish as ever. He said he's found 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 Pradeshal 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 Shemishol, 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. are. 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 Shemichel 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 Mackinson, and again a bloat with a 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, march into Shemichel. 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 then 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 hapsburg 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. These, if you're Gleesian, 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 Pshemishuil 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 this is to only kind of scratch 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 of 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 I mean, you know, we are talking about the world going up in flames, aren't we? This is, 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. and front, asking whether it happened, to what extent of the story is true. So a little touch of light. And actually, when we do come back to the First World, hopefully next year, I mean, there's so much to look forward to you, Tom, Zeppelin's, 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 Restis History Club will be able to get those episodes early, won't they? Of course they will. Why not sign up now at The Restist History.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 and 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'll see you then. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.