Introduction
From the outset of World War I in 1914, internal military reports on troops’ experiences—both in the German and the Imperial-Royal armies—repeatedly referred to a seemingly uncontrollable excess of violence among soldiers, who committed acts contrary to ideas of humane warfare. Military leaders observed these incidents with suspicion and, as a consequence, introduced a command and instruction practice that condemned crimes, tightened penalties (which included summary executions), and urgently appealed to soldiers to act in accordance with international law. However, these vigorous instructions had little effect, as the number of complaints and grievances increased over the course of the war, leaving both military commanders and civilian observers at a loss. In November 1914, for example, the governor of Galicia reported to the Austrian minister of the interior that, in the context of the first rearguard battles on the Austrian-Russian eastern front, “looting, pillaging, branding, and raping” by Austro-Hungarian troops was daily fare.Footnote 1 He continued that Austro-Hungarian troops also “burn down” or “otherwise destroy” entire “villages … for no necessary reason” in Serbia.Footnote 2 “Our troops have wreaked havoc worse than the Swedes in the Thirty Years’ War,” the chief of the general staff division of the Fifth Army Command in Mitrovica, Serbia, noted in his diary on October 1, 1914. He continued that “nothing, absolutely nothing is in one piece.”Footnote 3 The Serbian enemy had also “behaved like a conqueror without culture,” “destroying the property of the population.” Furthermore, “rapes have taken place and peaceful residents have been murdered or taken prisoner.”Footnote 4 In a similar vein, it was said that Russian troops had caused “Vandalic devastation” in the eastern theater of war.Footnote 5 In many cases, everything was destroyed “in a senseless rage.”Footnote 6 It was like a “sea of blood and horrors, of senseless devastation and useless deportation of people, of fire and looting.”Footnote 7 Thus it was only shortly after the war began that—in the words of the Bohemian officer Ernst Cermak—“the human beast, unleashed through the war” gave rise to horror and indignation.Footnote 8
Historiographical discourse has often explained the much cited “unleashed human beast” in a rather one-dimensional and categorical way. In this vein, historians have referred to a radicalized culture of military warfare with respect to specific armies—often precisely those that are the historian'sresearch focus.Footnote 9 For a long time, “German atrocities,” seen in Belgium and northern France at the beginning of the war, were considered somewhat unprecedented and exceptional.Footnote 10 A ruthless military command culture has served as another explanation for the escalation of violence, with historians pointing to aspects of army organizational structure. The latter has fed the often-stated assumption that the escalation of violence was caused by systemically occurring, explicitly ordered—or rather motivated—transgressions of norms.Footnote 11 Yet such interpretations distorta much more complex set of circumstances. Recent research on military history, the history of violence, and gender historyFootnote 12 that compares different fronts and armies clearly shows similarities and striking parallels in transgressions of norms.Footnote 13 That research also rebuts hitherto commonplace Sonderweg arguments and renders culturalist explanations barely probable.Footnote 14
But the question arises: How, then, can we explain the escalation of violence on the fronts of the First World War? Often, the historiography invokes the real or imagined presence of franc-tireurs, specific military cultural peculiarities, or a radicalized command culture to explanationthe escalation of violence. I propose looking instead at a broader perspective,and building upon recent interdisciplinary research on violence as well as new research results concerning the armies of the Central Powers in the eastern theaters of war and in the Balkans regarding violent acts committed there that broke international law. Existing studies on transgressions of military norms and war atrocities during the First World War do not—or only marginally—address more recent sociological, social sociological, or cultural scientific studies on violence. Thus an interdisciplinary history of violence of the First World War, which—unlike the Second World War—is still in its beginnings, remains a desideratum of research.Footnote 15 This article will pay particular attention to the spatial and temporal situatedness of violence as a concrete practice, which is central to understanding it, but scarcely mentioned. Center stage is thus the actual military confrontation and mobile warfare that was characteristic for the eastern and the Balkan fronts of the First World War as a definitive state of “interactive violence.”Footnote 16 Violent acts in military confrontations where primarily situational violence spread and often escalated will be the focus. In the context of mobile warfare, atrocities and breaches of international law occurred particularly often during phases of offensive warfare when front breakthroughs were made and the rapid advances of one party provoked the hasty withdrawal of the adversary into enemy territory. This rather frequent back-and-forth constellation during battles, which often also affected the civilian population, resembles the nature of what Randall Collins has coined as “forward panic.”Footnote 17 Muchexcessive violence occurred in the context of the specific dynamics of violence during forward panics of military units. Based on this assumption, I will shed light on the nature and character of military forward panics during the First World War. Central are, first, the “dynamics of escalation and aggravation,”Footnote 18 which were per se inherent to the specific process of violence in forward panics during battles and combats. Second, I will focus on the organizational “self-enhancement effects,”Footnote 19 and thus—informed by organizational sociology—explore to what extent and, more specifically, which military organizational aspects could have had escalating effects in combat.
The first section will map out the constitutive characteristics of the front as a specific site of violence, the role that military commands played, and the significance of the front as an imaginative space for soldiers. In addition to situational conditionalities of forward panic, which will be subsequently probed, these three central factors also had a decisive impact on the nature of violence in military confrontations.
Constitutive Characteristics of the Front as a Site of Violence
The soldier's relationship to the prevailing practice of violence was shaped by two main features: first, the hermetically sealed battlefieldFootnote 20 due to the tendency to create a secured and confined front space through military regulations and the threat of penalties, a tendency that increased over the course of the war. On the eastern and Balkan fronts during the First World War, the German as well as the Austro-Hungarian battle zone was usually three to five kilometers wideFootnote 21 and was referred to as the “prohibited area,”Footnote 22 or “no-go zone.”Footnote 23 Over the course of the war, both one's own population and enemy civilian populations—primarily because they were often suspected of collective espionage—were evacuated or deported from the actual combat zone. This zone permanently changed under the conditions of mobile warfare to the rear area or hinterland. Deportations of civilians were usually limited to the immediate front area. More extensive evacuations of civilians from the wider front area were supposed to be avoided because rearward mass movement was deemed inadvisable, due to the gradually deteriorating food situation in the rear area and hinterland.Footnote 24 The German troops established so-called Ortsbereiche (local areas) with Ortskommandanturen (local commander's offices) in those areas of the combat zones that were adjacent to the hermetically sealed positions. Local commanders—Ortskommandanten—as chiefs of the Ortskommandaturen were invested with extensive police powers. They commanded the military police or military gendarmerie, which was responsible for maintaining public safety in the command area and, above all, surveilling the civilian population. This surveillance implied a close-meshed system of control, acquisition, and repression measures that enabled the arrest or rather the deportation of allegedly suspicious civilians and drastically restricted civilian movement in response to risk considerations.Footnote 25 In addition to various measures to keep the civilian population under surveillance, the executive bodies of the Ortskommandanturen and, in the Austro-Hungarian sphere of influence, the posts of the country or military gendarmerie (Landes- or Feldgendarmerie) were also in charge of cordoning off the front area. Warning and prohibition signs as well as periodically repeated announcements informed the civilian population in the villages located near the front zone about these measures.Footnote 26 They were intended not only to keep the local population away from the front lines but also to prevent soldiers from escaping to the hinterland via the “prohibited zone.” The high number of soldiers flowing back after being scattered during military combat and the increasing number of offenses of military refusal and evasion became growing problems for the German and particularly the Austro-Hungarian armies. “There are more armed persons behind the front lines than at the front lines,” noted the commander of the Austro-Hungarian First Army, disappointed and exasperated, in his diary. From his perspective, it was “terrible how many people are roving about in the rear.”Footnote 27 Even Field Marshall General August von Mackensen complained that “stragglers lingering behind the front lines” had become “a menace.”Footnote 28 Almost in resignation, the Austro-Hungarian 32nd Infantry Division stated that “ruthless measures [are] absolutely necessary,” otherwise “the troops will flutter apart and crumble away completely.”Footnote 29 To better manage the “scattered” soldiers fleeing the front lines, additional gendarmerie, police, and military units were deployed in the prohibited zone of the front area. The military leadership also reminded the commanding officers of the need of “draconian stringency”Footnote 30 in dealing with so-called “shirkers,” as they were referred to in military jargon.Footnote 31 Occasionally, several so-called “gendarmerie cordons” (Gendarmeriekordons) were established in the rear area of the Austro-Hungarian eastern front in the hope of coming better to grips with the “problem” of “scattered” soldiers flowing back. Deploying organized patrols in villages and forests was intended to address the problem in an active way.Footnote 32 Thus the spatial hermetic of the combat zone that impeded or rendered any form of prohibited mobility impossible affected soldiers and civilians alike. The attempt to defy this specific hermetic and its system of military prohibitions and regulations often resulted in severe penalties up to and including capital punishment. For this reason, we can, second, consider the combat zone, generally speaking, as a space “open to violence”—gewaltoffen—defined by both the violation of prohibitions and compliance with regulations.Footnote 33 From the perspective of the civilian population, the front line primarily represented a no-go zone of some sort. Trespassing into this space or even moving toward it within the close vicinity of the militarily defined prohibited zone could result in death. Even though the physical space of the front was cordoned-off and imagined as hermetically isolated, “front” and “homeland” were in fact not separate spheres. Recent research has convincingly shown that, despite the distance and persistent separation between the two spheres of life, there were many fields of interaction, ensuring continuous exchange.
The front soldier, on the other hand, was, above all, obliged to participate in military combat, which ipso facto meant he was not allowed to refuse to fight or to leave the combat zone without orders—both forward and backward. Moreover, the front soldier was also part of a military security apparatus that, among other things, required him to discipline and punish civilians who had wrongfully entered the front area, which could include killing them on instructions or as ordered. The soldier was thus not only a “victim” of the rigid military system of repression that suppressed nonconformist behavior at the front lines. In the context of this system of repression of the civilian population —which was possibly contrary to international law—he was also an executing “perpetrator.”
The state of command and military practice in executing the ban on civilians entering the combat zone, show a certain range both in the German and the Austro-Hungarian armies. It would appear that, in general, the prevailing practice was to eliminate civilians just for being present in the combat zone. In these cases, the state of command was clear and unambiguous: “Entering the area behind the fighting troops where local inhabitants have been evacuated is only permitted for members of the allied armies, otherwise only for persons accompanied by military personnel,” reads the order of the Army Group Linsingen that operated on the eastern front. “Whoever else is seen there will be shot.”Footnote 34 The German Alpine Corps issued a similar order, according to which civilians who crossed the prohibited line “could be shot without further ado.”Footnote 35 The same applied to the area where Württemberg troopsoperated on the eastern front: “It is strictly prohibited to come close to the front line! Anyone who violates this ban will be shot without exception.”Footnote 36 While the regulations mentioned thus far were unambiguous, diverging command cultures and practices pertained to other bodies of troops. The threat of killing also took center stage here but was tied to certain prohibited or incriminating behavior, such as possessing a firearm, suspicion of espionage, or any other allegedly suspicious behavior. In many cases, there was no explicit instruction on how to execute the sanctions, which, at the level of issuing military orders, already allowed for some leeway. For the 17th Austro-Hungarian Corps Command, the “presence of civilians at the combat zone” was “not to be tolerated.” Those found there were either “to be arrested or killed” immediately.Footnote 37
In the same vein, there was a broad variety of imperatives for action represented by military orders that not only intended to keep soldiers at the front lines but also make them participate in active fighting. Three aims dominated in this respect: first, preventing soldiers from deserting to the “enemy” by crossing the death zone; second, to bring soldiers,if necessary through the use of violence,to the front lines and make them actively participate in combat; and third, to prevent soldiers from fleeing the front and escaping to their own rear area or hinterland. The range of military measures provided for the use of armed force, even including—more or less categorically—killing soldiers who violated any of these three strictures. However, actions taken against noncompliant soldiers were also governed by orders that provided a certain leeway. They demanded “strength and vigor”Footnote 38 without elaborating,, urged the use of “all measures available,”Footnote 39 or stipulated nothing more than “to potentially use the force of arms.”Footnote 40 In general, however, orders that demanded “strength” even when dealing with their own soldiers were marked by an inflammatory tone. Shortly after the beginning of the war, during the battle of Galicia, the commander of the Austro-Hungarian Third Army operating on the eastern front, General Svetozar Boroevic, had already decreed that “scattered” soldiers and “shirkers” had “to be killed without consideration.” Every front soldier, he continued, had the choice “between victory, even when won with blood, and honorable perseverance before the enemy, or a certain and shameful death in the wake of an unauthorized leave of absence from his unit.”Footnote 41 An order issued in the area of the First Austro-Hungarian Army on September 7, 1914, “reminded … officers and troops” that “every superior officer has the power—and even the obligation—to immediately kill or order to kill a subordinate soldier who runs away during combat, or throws away weapons or ammunition, or stays behind to avoid combat.”Footnote 42 In the area of the Austro-Hungarian 8th Infantry Division, it was likewise decreed that every man “is to be killed … who, without having been wounded, is picked up without weapons and cannot present a permit or order to leave the front lines.”Footnote 43 Similarly, orders aimed atother bodies of troops attempted to set a deterrent example.Footnote 44 During the 1914 advance in Serbia, the commander of the Balkan army gave the unambiguous order: “Marauders are to be shot.”Footnote 45
Officers’ war memories, in which narratives of violent actions against subordinate soldiers are of significant importance, and illustrate the frequent use of weapons against their own troops. As early as the initial battles on the eastern front in 1914, the commander of the First Imperial-Royal Army, General Viktor Dankl, for example, carried out a “raid” in his area of command against ”shirkers” and “scattered soldiers,” issuing orders to “kill everyone.”Footnote 46 In the area of the Second Army, “gendarmes, under the leadership of officers and civilian commissioners” maintained “order … with pistol and rope.”Footnote 47 Karl Czapp Freiherr von Birkenstetten, commander of a division on the eastern front at the beginning of the war, recalls that “all bodies” of his staff “drew their revolvers and chased the men back to the front lines at my command.”Footnote 48 First Lieutenant Richard Kolby of the Infantry Regiment 99 likewise ordered “the shooting of troops that stayed back.” This was, according to Kolbay, the “last chance to bring the discouraged troops to obedience.”Footnote 49 The Russian soldiers opposite German and Austro-Hungarian troops were likewise often held at the front lines by force of arms and literally herded toward the enemy lines. In some cases, soldiers flowing back were fired at with machine guns regardless of the consequences. When in the context of the Battle of the Masurian Lakes a larger Russian contingent intended to desert toward the German positions via the front line, Russian machine guns opened fire on their own troops. It is said that approximately 1,000 soldiers died in the process.Footnote 50 An order to shoot deserters was also given in the German and the Austro-Hungarian armies.Footnote 51
Apart from and in addition to the imperative to kill in the regular course of military combat, the combat zone as a field of interaction subject to both war regulations and war practices thus represented an extremely hostile and deadly environment for soldiers and civilians alike. Its general openness to violence (Gewaltoffenheit) redefined the soldiers’ relationship to violence in a new way. For soldiers, experiencing military executions within the combat zone, being aware of—in the literal sense—potentially deadly consequences of nonconformist behavior, finding themselves integrated into a frontline system of penalties and repressions geared toward killing, and being subject to the imperative to kill civilians under circumstances underpinned and enforced by orders—all this turned the front spaces into what we might call “free fire zones.” Particularly for civilians, this meant that “everyone who was unlucky enough to be found in such a zone could be fired at, be it a soldier, a child, or an old man.”Footnote 52 In general, most military orders that regulated the treatment of civilians and deviant soldiers contained a threat of death. Even rather vague orders that allowed for greater leeway still entailed a variety of possibilities of “‘You May!’ within the ‘You Must!,’” which altogether enlarged the “space of arbitrariness” regarding the treatment of civilians and nonconformist soldiers in the front area.Footnote 53 A radicalizing practice of violence on the battlefield, the focus of military orders on killing, and the practice of applying them constituted experiential and organizational factors that—after having shifted due to the war—determined the soldiers’ specific subframe of reference regarding the combat zone. This subframe of reference changed the soldier's view of his environment, integrating the scope of action as outlined previously and the experienced, suggested, ordered, or self-initiative killing of persons uninvolved in combat or of deviant combatants into the set of standards and norms of seemingly justified actions that remained unquestioned.Footnote 54
Orders with Room for Maneuver: Strict but Fair?
As mentioned in the introduction, however, those military orders given to soldiers as a binding code of conduct when they went to the battlefields—which often take center stage in historiographical analyses—must be seen in a differentiated manner. To be sure, most of codes of conduct—for example, those issued by the Austro-Hungarian army regarding the type of warfare in Serbia at the beginning of the war—clearly insisted on strictness, decisiveness, and ruthlessness. On the other hand, the military leadership also wanted to ensure that “the troops marching into Serbia would prove themselves worthy of a great power.”Footnote 55 The Imperial-Royal Army had to become a “terrible but also chivalrous adversary, who is,if necessary, ruthless,but never cruel and inhumane.”Footnote 56 The “Directives for the Behavior of the Troops in Battle and in Enemy Territory” issued by the 9th Infantry Division Command and announced to the soldiers stated: “If we in Serbia do not want to wage a war against every single citizen, then we must—naturally in strict accordance with all necessary caution and depending on circumstances—show real consideration towards the genuinely peaceful population and protect them and their property.”Footnote 57 In view of the looming war, the Austro-Hungarian army High Command at the top of the chain of command also urged complying with the regulations of the Hague Convention. Moreover, numerous instructions of different bodies of troops insisted on compliance with international law, even if the enemy would violate it.Footnote 58 A war in violation of international law was “unworthy of the army of a great power” and must be prevented “with the strictest means possible.”Footnote 59 In view of the imminent battles on July 30, 1914, the commander of the 15th Corps, General Michael Edler von Appel, reminded his soldiers: “Even when facing the enemy, do not forget the commandments of noble humanity and soldierly chivalry! Wounded enemy soldiers, defenseless women, children, and peaceful citizens are in your protective hands; property of another is inviolable and enjoys your protection!”Footnote 60
Similar decrees issued in the German armyFootnote 61 paint the common picture of leeway and strict-but-fair orders, oscillating between strictness and level-headedness in an antagonistic manner. The practical proportionality of the military course of action—which largely shifted between these two poles—was essentially left to the commanding officers, who interpreted and applied this leeway very differently.Footnote 62 For example, an order of the Second Austro-Hungarian army Command prescribed “acting with all due vigor without seeking confirmation of subordinate commands.”Footnote 63 It was not a “systematic war of extermination,” ordered “from above,Footnote 64” but rather leeway that troops and their commanders used differently toward the two aforementioned options for action that characterized not only Austro-Hungarian warfare on the Balkan front.
In the end, the orders that insisted on both ruthlessness and humane behavior often exhibited a formulaic rhetoric. As Christopher Browning has aptly argued in a different context, “Despite the hate-filled propaganda of each nation and the exterminatory rhetoric of many leaders and commanders, such atrocities still represented a breakdown in discipline and the chain of command. They were not ‘standard operating procedure.’”Footnote 65
Indeed, it must be stressed there was no “guiding directive” (Richtlinienbefehl) in either the Austro-Hungarian or the German army that unconditionally ordered actions breaking international law. Having said that, the level of military command and its significance for the practice of violence should not be overestimated, either. Focusing solely on command structures and military orders “from above” is unlikely to explain the complex causes and full extent of war crimes committed on the fronts of the First World War. As will be discussed in what follows, military commands in fact played a rather minor role in the dynamics of combat. Although at least a part of transgressions of military norms apparently did not relate to any relevant orders, the numerous instructions and decrees intended to prevent them seem to have failed in containing the escalation of violence at the front lines. Violence often occurred situationally and could not be prevented by commands or orders alone.
Tensions, Fear, and Uncertainty: Battlefield Anticipations and Soldiers’ Experiences
From the soldiers’ perspectives, the beginning of a military confrontation—be it a unit's “baptism of fire” or a rite of passage on the battlefield in subsequent combat—was shaped by “the tension of the confrontation”Footnote 66 and fear. The latter was, above all, the result of unsettling battlefield anticipations. In the soldiers’ imagination, the front lines were a threatening and hostile space of destruction and irregular warfare. This idea was not only based on one's own experiences on the ground in the context of military combat. Soldiers already anticipated the nature of the battle in the form of diffuse imaginings fed by different sources of information and a specific image of the battlefield, the enemy's supposed way of fighting, and one's own imagined position in the fighting. The significance of the front lines as an imaginative space for soldiers cannot be overestimated. Battlefield imaginations merged with one's own experiences at the front and the soldiers’ war experience. The imagined battlefield was the result of information formally conveyed via military orders, official (often intelligence) recommendations “from above,” and media interpretations. Other inputs also played a central role, including those conveyed via informal communication channels (such as from troops already deployed at the front via soldiers of reserve and marching units or from stories told by wounded soldiers and civilians). On various levels, numerous rumors circulating about the enemy's supposedly cruel way of warfareand breaches of international law, played a decisive role in the soldiers’ imagination.
The image of the fighting conveyed by rumors and stories tended to become increasingly threatening with every step in this informal communication chain. Details of enemy atrocities, described by supposed eyewitnesses—and thus internalized as authentic—were retold from soldier to soldier. The informal rumor mongering about atrocities in some cases evoked an almost bizarre escalation, resulting in a “feeling of incalculable threat”Footnote 67 and a more or less intensive self-radicalization of soldiers based on these rumors. At the front, rumors often created an atmosphere of increasing uncertainty. Nervousness, fear, and the tension of the confrontation were ubiquitous. Infantryman Friedrich Tollich noted stories of Russian Cossacks and their way of fighting on the eastern front in his diary: “A feeling of unease permeated one's entire body. For a few seconds, one feels an invisible pressure on one's throat. One struggles to catch one's breath.”Footnote 68 “The Austrian officers gave us a good scare about Serbia, where we are going,” the German soldier Albrecht Harrer wrote in his diary. “For them, we were doomed.”Footnote 69 In gloomy premonitions, and often even before the beginning of the combat mission, the battlefield presented itself to the soldiers as an awe-inspiring, perilous, and unregulated terrain, where serenity was the main principle and anything and everyone could turn out to be dangerous. The scenario of ubiquitous danger that circulated in rumor caused “hysterical war mania” among soldiers, as Colonel Alexander Brosch von Aarenau, commander of the 2nd Tyrolian Kaiserjäger Regiment, noted in his diary. In the eyes of his troops, “every bit of smoke” was “a burning village, every stork an airplane, every noise gunfire or the thunder of cannons.”Footnote 70 “So many lies are told,” wrote Paul Klette, “so much nonsense is believed.” Many soldiers always expected “the worst from the enemy” and felt they were in a “tight corner.”Footnote 71 On August 17, 1914, Captain Josef Lechner from Steyr, Upper Austria, wrote in his diary: “The troops are getting more and more nervous. They assume the enemy is behind every movement. They think that three women are a machine gun unit.”Footnote 72
Apart from these imaginings, tension and anxiety also resulted from individual experiences of military confrontations and were closely linked with the feeling of a ubiquitous uncertainty in the context of combat, which, for its part, caused situational moments or scenarios of individual loss of control and disorientation.Footnote 73 The fear of surprise attacks and guerilla warfare of the Russian or Serbian enemy was particularly pronounced on the eastern and the Balkan fronts. Expectations and fears as well as imagined or lived experiences in this context held particular potential for unease and destabilization. The supposed or real presence of partisans or guerillas in military combat resulted in permanent anxiety among the troops, which could culminate in panic-ridden flight.
Soldiers’ perceptions of combat, however, were not only shaped by fear of surprise attacks, irregular warriors, and enemy atrocities, but also by the usually chaotic nature of military confrontations. Often, soldiers were unable to target precisely and shoot effectively as a result of the tension of the confrontation in early battles. For this reason, a substantial number of troops was not actively engaged in combatFootnote 74 or started “random shoot-outs.”Footnote 75 Furthermore, difficulties of orientation, the inexperience of soldiers at the beginning of the war, and obvious misunderstandings sometimes led to “friendly fire,” that is, attacks on allied troops or one's own units,Footnote 76 which caused chaotic or panicked reactions and accounted for many victims.Footnote 77 According to contemporary terminology, in the moment of the military encounter “no-one had a clear idea of what was happening…. One dashes forward, one runs, one falls to the ground, gets up again, and fires like in a dream. Every sense of time is gone.… One no longer feels like a personality and is but a part, a splinter, a molecule of a formless mass, squirming in excitement and cramps.”Footnote 78 This was further aggravated by the fact that, particularly at the beginning of the war, the Central Powers experienced various problems and adversities—both on the strategic and the operative levels—so that often things did not go according to plan.
All these factors characterize the battlefield as a space extremely open to violence. Managing or organizing this space was apparently very difficult and only possible to a limited extent. Thus, in the context of military confrontation, the battlefield presented itself as a genuine space of contingency or chaos. The proverbial “barbaric chaos of battle”Footnote 79 evoked a type of violence that—as mentioned previously—could hardly be brought under control by instructions, commands, orders, or appeals.
On the Situational Violence of Forward Panics
Military operational situations where a military impasse escalated and the enemy was forced to withdraw were particularly decisive regarding specific forms of violence. The scenario of hunting and fleeing often resulted in the escalation of violence, primarily due to the structure and design of a successful military offensive and the dynamics of a swift advance. I would like to propose that future research on irregular violence in the First World War should place more attention on three mutually intertwined clusters of factors crucial for these—following Randall Collin's terminology—military “forward panics.” Not only do they refer to the already-mentioned dynamic of escalation and aggravation that the specific process of violence of the forward panic during battle was based on structurally. They also apply to organizational self-reinforcement in relation to military group dynamics. Overall, they can inform the history of violence as a spatial military history, which is of crucial significance in the context of studying soldiers’ violence in military conflict and has hitherto been largely ignored in First World War research.Footnote 80
Military offensive and defensive constellations, in which such forward panics may have played a significant role, not only occurred on the western front (especially at the beginning of the war) but also on the eastern and Balkan fronts.Footnote 81 The Russian invasion of Habsburg territories, for example, led to continuous attacks on the mainly Jewish civilian population. In numerous pogroms, there was widespread looting, expulsions, massive destruction, executions, and rapes, especially in eastern Galicia. Similar attacks,part of a whole series of massacres that claimed several thousand lives, took place in East Prussia. Violent attacks of a similar scale were carried out by soldiers of the Imperial-Royal Army against the civilian populations in Galicia, Bukovina, and Serbia, who were regarded as Russophiles.Footnote 82 According to credible estimates, the number of Serbian civilians arbitrarily executed during the first invasion in August 1914—that is, in a period of barely two weeks—totaled 3,500 to 4,000.Footnote 83 Finally, as a last example, reference should be made to the war crimes in the territories of today's Ukraine in 1918, which have been researched most recently.Footnote 84 Overall, however, further studies are needed to provide a more complete picture of the escalation of violence in violation of international law on the eastern and Balkan fronts.
Battle as a Subframe of Reference in Mobile Warfare
The first cluster of factors [of what?]results from the battle in mobile warfare as a specific subframe of reference for soldiers. As a space hermetically closed via regulations and prohibitions, and due to a radicalized treatment of various forms of deviance at the front, the battlefield represented a special frame of reference for soldiers, particularly where violence was concerned. Rapidly changing spaces of violent confrontation emerged under the shadow of imminent confrontation with the enemy and during concrete phases of mobile warfare, which significantly intensified the extant character of the front as a space open to violence during phases of immobile warfare. The differentiation process of various subspaces of the extended battlefield corresponded with an experience-immanent spatial perception, as described, for example, by Kurt Lewin in his phenomenological approach to the dichotomous nature of “peace things” and “things of combat.”Footnote 85 From the perspective of the soldiers, a perception-immanent metamorphosis that reidentified topographic characteristics, artificial objects, and, to some extent, also living beings, occurred on the battlefield.Footnote 86 Occasionally, the interpretation of “combat formations” (Gefechtsgebilde) blurred the perception of absolute horror and unease about brute force at the front as a space of destruction.Footnote 87 This interpretation tended to see destruction and extermination as necessities of war, treating the “thingly” environment with casual indifference. The changed perception of the imagined space of war as a specific space (which did not, or not to the same extent, apply to the rear area of the so-called “land” [Kurt Lewin]) resulted, as we have already seen, both from learning and coping practices of soldiers in the context of front experiences and from spatial definitions and orders that regulated their behavior on the battlefield. Perceptions and orders caused a particular spatial relation of the soldier to his environment on the battlefield. The specific triangle of the soldier, space, and environment evoked patterns of interpretation and norms of behavior that, as already mentioned, constituted a specific frame of reference for soldiers. Following Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer's concept of the “frame of reference of war,” we can spatially specify this notion as a subframe of reference of battle.Footnote 88 “The soldier has two types of skin,” Ludwig Scholz wrote in 1920, “one has been given to him by the war, the other one he wears as a civilian.”Footnote 89 The subframe of reference contributed to redetermining the soldier's relation to the practice of violence under spatial and temporal criteria, and defining the gray areas of and border lines between what was allowed or frowned upon at the front and in battle. “That which lies within the combat zone,” Lewin wrote, “belongs to the soldier as his rightful property, not because it has been captured—for things are quite different in the captured regions behind the position—but because, as a combat formation, it is a military thing, which is naturally there for the soldier's benefit.”Footnote 90
The soldier's reference-immanent understanding of the battle character of things and the essentially structural character of military advances as being open to violence—as well as military orders commanding swift and ruthless behavior on the one hand and the presence of deadly and imminent danger in view of the armed enemy and orientation difficulties in the chaotic space of battle shaped by the tension of confrontation and by fear on the other hand—redefined and, to a certain extent, escalated the soldier's relationship to violence. This changed frame of reference included a “particular ethical concept”Footnote 91 that substantially differed from general or universal moral ideas. It underpinned the practice of violence in mobile warfare confrontations with a “particular rationality”Footnote 92 that made soldiers’ actions appear legitimate and reasonable . Abstract international legal norms or ethical considerations faded into the background within this specific combat situation,Footnote 93 and the extended frame of reference suggested, as Herbert Jäger aptly describes, a “freedom of action without accountability,”Footnote 94 including “legitimate sadisms.”Footnote 95 In his seminal psychography of the warrior, Paul Plaut recalls: “I have never seen any sort of conscience after battle, not even with very religious people; the idea of defending their own lives, protecting themselves played a dominant role.” Soldiers in battle did not “exhibit any ethical qualms,” Plaut wrote.Footnote 96 One would “kill without a qualm,” stated Erich Everth, and “shoot without thinking about what one was doing.” The “moral introspection” mostly did not happen.Footnote 97
Dynamics of Asymmetrical Confrontation
The pervasive “process of asymmetrical entrainment” in the context of military forward panics is a second important factor.Footnote 98 It essentially means that the more or less successfully and swiftly advancing warring party could also cause the—in some circumstances even panic-ridden—disintegration of the withdrawing enemy. A rapid gain of territory and the accelerating offensive—or rather withdrawal—in these cases resulted in a temporal acceleration of the military confrontation, which could ultimately have a radicalizing effect on both warring sides. An advance that in many ways resembled a “hunt”Footnote 99 often entailed the escalation of violence, even in the form of cruel war crimes. There were “moments of frenzy during a charge, at the highest expenditure of energy and in the greatest danger, when the rapid advance and nervous excitement caused some sort of ecstasy.”Footnote 100 After the tension and fear of the forward panic, the soldiers entered an “emotional tunnel”Footnote 101 that resembled a “moral holiday”Footnote 102 and ultimately blurred or even eliminated the differences between regular and irregular violence. Ludwig Scholz wrote: “Close combat was dominated by purely sensory, animalistic feelings: killing is almost automatic, compassion is drowned in blood and steam.”Footnote 103 Swiftly advancing during combat created a situation where “traditional legal and moral concepts were abandoned all at once.”Footnote 104 Over the course of the war, the nature of forward panic was further intensified by tactical innovations aimed at acceleration and surprise attacks and the transition to a “system of aggressive defensive,” which already inherently included the escalation of violence and the “extravagance of killing” to some extent.Footnote 105 The final result of the escalation that was already structurally laid out in the new form of military conflict, including forms of highly affective and “autotelic violence,”Footnote 106 which many actors themselves considered transgressive in retrospect.Footnote 107 Transgressions manifested themselves in murdered civilians and prisoners of war, destroyed and burned down houses and villages, as well as mass rapes. As Paul Plaut argued, “No one in his right mind would withstand the atrocities of a battle, and no one would condone them.”Footnote 108 In military egodocuments this “tunnel journey” is often described as a kind of deindividualization, a clouding of consciousness, a trance-like frenzy, or, in a metaphorical sense, a a dream state. The soldier, understood as an “anti-subject,”Footnote 109 turned back into an individual in control over his actions only after the battle: “One comes to one's senses”; it was like “awaking from a heavy dream.”Footnote 110
However, enemy stereotypes and ideological radicalization played a minor role in the context of forward panics—which were essentially a communication-related mass phenomenon.Footnote 111 Rather, concrete experiences on the ground (death or injury of a comrade, alleged or real war atrocities of the enemy) could provoke short-term and situational feelings of hatred, rage, and revenge, which intensified or motivated violent behavior.Footnote 112 Individual attempts to rationalize and justify violent actions—which always referred to the battle as a space that was per se open to violence—played an important role for the soldiers’ perspective, as did so-called “path dependencies,” a concept according to which violent behavior was very likely to be repeated after a previous transgression.Footnote 113 Regarding the temporal dimension of violence in military forward panics (surprise attack, break through, hunt-like pursuit of the enemy), the extent and intensity of atrocities were decisive in the context of the invasion of enemy territory, particularly with a view to advance guards and first occupation troops. The scenario of hunting and fleeing, disorientation and uncertainty about (civilian and military) defense, as well as a disciplinary system that was not fully established during the invasion phase facilitated excesses of violence. The situation usually improved with the transition from invasion to occupation and the establishment of a regular power of command.
Soldiers often experienced the previously described situations of absolute military power during the hunt-like pursuit of the enemy as an emotional peak, which even intensified violent behavior that could hardly be contained and, to some extent, corresponded with emotions such as satisfaction, passion, and joy.Footnote 114 “Technicalized massacres,” typical of the First World War, are particularly striking examples of this.Footnote 115 As mentioned earlier, advancing troops completely destroyed entire villages during these massacres without consideration of (civilian) losses. In ego-documents, soldiers repeatedly describe the numerous villages that were burned, sacked, and razed to the ground during military offenses as an “eerily beautiful picture of the war.”Footnote 116 The Austrian soldier Otto Humpelstätter writes in his war diary about such an experience on the eastern front:
On May 5, they also shot at inhabited villages. Weeping, wailing, and lamenting, the civilians had to leave their belongings and flee the village. It was very moving to see women with babies in their arms, men carrying stuff wrapped in bedsheets, older children following them on the road. Even they were shot at. child, women, and man were left on the road, dead.Footnote 117
In contrast to the positive emotional mood during at least partially successful assaults, depression and resignation spread during forced withdrawals. This often rendered maintaining military discipline impossible and, in the context of the often panic-stricken disintegration of defeated units, intensified violence and made military refusal a mass occurrence. “During this withdrawal, carried out under the heaviest infantry machine gun and artillery fire,” wrote an Austrian lieutenant on the eastern front in his diary in late August 1914, “all order and cohesion dissolved, the only thing everyone thought of was to save … his own life; armor parts, sometimes the entire armor, even the rifle were thrown away, and everyone ran.”Footnote 118 Following a similar logic as offensives, military withdrawals were in some cases also accompanied by pillage, destruction, and extreme atrocities.
Organizational Self-Enhancement Effects
Finally, a third crucial factor of violence in military forward panics is related to organizational self-enhancement effects, which result from the role of soldiers’ primary groups in battle.Footnote 119 Based on his own experiences on the eastern front of the First World War, the German neurologist Ludwig Scholz described the importance of the military group for the process of escalating violence as follows:
In the ferocity of their excitement, it [the group or mass of soldiers] gives its members a feeling of irresistible power and takes the burden of responsibility from their shoulders (everyone follows the example of the other!); it even fills them with the sensation of doing the lawful, dutiful, and meritorious thing. Once they are agitated with excitement, a different world of thoughts, a different logic takes effect. Certainly, many of the better elements will not be able to get rid of the sensation they might act wrongfully, but for the masses, the heyday of passion carries them away. And even he who can remain calm and sober-minded, will get suspicious of himself, of his judgement, the tenderness of his conscience, and fears that his comrades take him for heartless, unpatriotic, or even cowardly: that is why he—partly willingly, partly unwillingly—goes with the flow.Footnote 120
These remarks carve out the essential features determining the self-enhancing character of group dynamics among soldiers in battle: the process of soldiers’ emotionalization in the context of military confrontation; group-immanent diffusion, or rather suspension, of responsibility; the likewise group-related process of direct mimetic communication and imitation; and, equally important, the more or less strong forms of peer pressure among soldiers. Particularly in phases of great uncertainty and tension during military confrontations, when the power of military command structures was limited or broke down completely,Footnote 121 the individual soldier was even more oriented toward group behavior. A group constituted in such a way was not so much based on existing military units including platoons or squads, but rather communicated in a largely informal and situational way.Footnote 122 Smaller collectives of soldiers that emerged ad hoc during battle and were hierarchically unstructured and flexible gained particular significance. These small groups, which often existed for only a short time, played an increasingly important role over the course of the war due to a shift toward mission-type tactics. In many cases, however, continuous changes in the composition of informal groups were simply the result of soldiers being killed, wounded, or scattered. For the individual soldier, the importance of the group was related to general uncertainty and imminent danger as well as to the specific challenges of the military confrontation.Footnote 123 In these dangerous situations, soldiers often followed the behavior of the group. The group and its changing leaders often effectively functioned as the “only reference group without any alternative”Footnote 124 providing guidance:
Anyone who gives the signal to move, who, for any reason whatsoever, continues to move, who rushes forward, a single word “Go” or “Move on,” brings movement into the whole line and makes it move forward again after the stoppage. This individual, who awakens spontaneously and has the power to carry along the others, does not have to stand out from the masses through particular courage or bravery—on the contrary, it is often nothing more than a streak of desperation in an individual that eliminates the stoppage. The others follow instinctively, they sink into the collective of the group.Footnote 125
The “greater the uncertainty” and “the more unfamiliar a situation,” the “stronger” the “consensus with the group” that determined the relevant subframe of reference in a largely communication-immanent way.Footnote 126 The group was the point of reference for the soldiers’ group-specific “practice legitimation recursions,” that is, actions legitimated through practice.Footnote 127 The moral compatibility of soldiers’ actions was hardly ever questioned. Thus the group was also a site of suppression of moral qualms.Footnote 128
Conclusion
War violence and the escalation of violence that broke international law become comprehensible only when the industrialized battlefield as the site of the military confrontation is not considered as an exclusively “thingly” or—more specifically,military geographical and physical--space but rather, using Kurt Lewin's field-theoretical terminology, a “psychological living space”Footnote 129 in a broader cultural geographical sense.Footnote 130 In this context, “inner spaces” of the battlefield, temporal rhythms of military confrontations in these spaces as violent social practice, and the soldiers’ spatial and temporal frame of reference that provided guidance come to the fore. Alongside command structure, soldiers’ imaginations of the front, as a threatening imaginative space, and perceptions of the battlefield, future research should pay more attention to dynamics of concrete combat operations and confrontations and their effects on practices of violence. A central question in this context is: which force fields, patterns of communication, and situational characteristics were decisive for those military forward panics that occurred in the context of operative offensives, and which often and in many places let combat get out of control?
The group-specific frame of reference served as a crucial guideline for soldiers’ social practice of violence—particularly in those situations that we today regard as transgressive and as having violatated international law. This frame of reference established a morality that blatantly differed from peace standards and, “from the perspective of the actors,” was able “to claim validity and guide their actions” in terms of the transgression of military norms.Footnote 131 Recent historiographical studies, increasingly informed by an interdisciplinary history of violence, have shown that several situational and experience-immanent factors affected the escalation of violence in a specific way—possibly to a greater extent than organizational (commands) and dispositional (ideology, enemy stereotypes, etc.) factors. The question of how and to what extent these various factors contributed to the process of violence, which can probably only be answered by further case studies, is still a great challenge for research on the First World War.
Oswald Überegger is a contemporary historian. He is head of the Competence Center for Regional History at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano and holds a professorship for contemporary history at the same university.
