AUSTRIA'S PATCHWORK ARMY

Dominion, Volume 8, Issue 2412, 18 March 1915, Page 6

AUSTRIA'S PATCHWORK ARMY

A GRADUAL DISINTEGRATION. Professor Pares, the authorised correspondent at Russian Headquarters, writing under date December 24, says. "I was specially struck by the easy relations existing between the inhabitants, the Austrian soldiers, and their captors. There were exceptions. I had some talk with a few Austrian Germans from Vienna. Thoy were simple folk and seemed to have no grudge against the Russians. They kept apart ■na far as possible not only from their captors, but from their fellow-prisoners from Bohemia and Moravia. Tliese last seemed at least quite comfortable, smoking their long pipes and leisurely sweeping the platforms. When I asked them how tiiey stood with the German troops instead of the sturdy 'Gut' of their Viennese fellows, they answered with a slang-word and a gesture. Asked as to the Russians, they replied in a quite matter of course way: 'We are brothers and speak -the same tongue; we are one people.' For any difficulties tho Poles of to prove. good interpreters. It is very different for the Austrian officers, wlw often cannot understand their own men. "These Czechs confidently assured me that any Russian troops that* entered Bohemia, would be welcomed as friends, and they claimed that hot only

the neighbouring Moravians and Slovaks, but also the Croats l'u'ther south, were to be taken as feeling as they Uhi The Bohemians and Moravians seom to bo surrendering in the largest numbers of all, and though the Viennese claimed that large mmioers of Russians had been taken, i cannot regard as anything but exceptional tho enormous batches of blue uniforms that I passed on tho road hero. "I spent Christmas Day in the hospitals. In one ward, at a local Austrian hospital, now full of ■wounded, I found that almost every one of tile nine patients was of a different nationality. Going round the room ono came on first a Pole of Western Galicia, then a Russian from the Urals, next a Iluthenian (Littlja Russian from Eastern Galicia), next a Magyar from Hungary, and against the wall a young German from Westphalia. After him came an Austrian German from Salzburg, a Serbian from Southern Hungary, another Riithenian, an Austrian German from Moravia, an Austrian German from Bohemia. and a Moravian from Moravia. "Much of our talk turned on the Austrian Army. The Germans said that it didn't hold out 'unless it was properly led by Germans.' In Bohemia and Moravia the regiments were mixed, o? Slavs and Austrian Germans, and, according to the Moravian soldiers, were constantly quarrelling; all tho officers were Austrian Germans, and even some of the, Hungarian regiments seemed to b<! commanded by Germans. The vourig Serbian spoke of frequent quarrels and: even brawls between Serbian and Hungarian fellow-soldiers. The great wis!) of all: was that the war should'end.' "Numbers of Austrian units are so reduced that tliey are only shadows of what they were, and some seem to ,havo disappeared altogether The Drdinarj drafts came in some time ago, and arc now exhausted—such is tho testimony of Austrian officers."-