Kill and be killed

In the great majority of letters sent home by the soldiers to their relatives, descriptions of their acts of killing were usually left out. Besides the official censorship by the Monarchy’s military apparatus, the soldiers’ own so-called self-censorship played a great role. This prevailed firstly out of consideration to those they loved at home, but on the other hand it also derived from ideas and (self-)interpretations of a “soldierly manliness”. The experiences and the fact of living every day with the violence of war, suffering and death were usually very difficult to write about in letters, which is why there is little mention of the wounds and death of comrades. This applies as well, states Christa Hämmerle, to Austrian literature commemorating the First World War, where “explicit references to the ‘craft of killing’, hand-to-hand combat and the palpable physical and mental consequences which the soldiers had to cope with, are rare [...]“.

Death in war wore many masks. It could appear in the form of illness, or in the mountains being buried alive in an avalanche or falling, or being mortally wounded by gunshot. The historian Benjamin Ziemann has shown that the artillery was the weaponry mainly responsible for wounds and deaths among the soldiers on the Western Front. Thus 76 % of all wounds suffered by French soldiers came from artillery gunshot, a frequency that according to surveys in 1917 also applied to the soldiers of the German Army.  Meanwhile artillery soldiers were exposed to less risk of being killed than for example infantry soldiers. Statistics for Austria demonstrate that the infantry had by far the highest losses. Alone by March 1915, 70,497 men from the ranks of the infantry were dead, 358,480 wounded and another 369,548 missing. By November 1918 these figures had risen to 330,226 dead, 1,364,161 wounded and 822,535 missing.

Regardless of how a soldier was wounded or killed, all ‘losses’ – and this meant not only the loss of a human life, but also of ‘fighting power’ through wounding, sickness, imprisonment or being missing – were recorded in lists that were then sent directly to the War Office.

In principle all the dead on one’s own or opposing side were to be secured, identified and buried. This was not only for hygienic reasons as protection against disease and epidemics, but was also a last tribute and gesture of honour for the fallen. This succeeded very rarely, and many of the “fallen for the Fatherland” could not be identified or were simply no longer identifiable. Likewise, many of them remained without a final resting place, as documented by the Tyrolean Kaiserjäger Johann Mittermaier in his diary: “The fallen were lying everywhere. Gruesome corpses, decaying or shrunken, with cramped hands and feet and gaping mouth. (…) One evening, in the pallid light of the moon, Leutnant P. ordered us to clear this mountain peak (…) of the corpses. On the saddle, a steep, deep ravine yawned upwards towards the north. The dead were to be dropped down there. Two men grasped a corpse under the knees and armpits, led it to the brink and swung it over and down. No one mentioned identification.”

Translation: Abigail Prohaska