Back to the Front

At the end of August 1916, Romania entered the war on the side of the Entente powers. With new vigor, the united Russian and Romanian forces pushed forward into Transylvania and started making their way into the Hungarian plains. But their success was short-lived. Within two months, the German armies of Falkenhayn and Mackensen halted the enemy, regained the lost territory, drove the Entente forces back into the Transylvanian Alps, and from there into the Romanian heartland around Bucharest. When the Entente abandoned its positions in the mountains, it was clear that they would not be able to hold the Romanian plains either. Within another month, all of Romania had been conquered and the Russian and Romanian troops were driven back into Ukraine.

The entire campaign took place in the midst of a deep crisis in Austrian politics. On October 21, 1916, Friedrich Adler, the radical son of social-democratic leader Viktor Adler, gunned down Prime Minister Count Karl Stürgkh in a Vienna restaurant, ostensibly in protest against the government's longstanding refusal to convene the parliament. Exactly one month later, eighty-six year old Emperor Franz Joseph died. The only man who had successfully held the reluctant nations of the empire together had gone the way of all flesh. His grandnephew, twenty-nine year old Karl, ascended the throne and appointed a new government under Count Clam-Martinic.

In the wake of this regime change, Mises was ordered to leave Department 13. The order came on very short notice. He might have expected a transfer from one part of the War Ministry to another, but it became clear that he had been picked out for another mission on the frontlines.

As details came forward, the picture darkened. Initially he thought he would lead a battery of a regular field cannon regiment, as he had done before, but the last-minute order made it clear that he would be sent on a mountain mission, which implied even greater physical duress.⁶⁴ To top it all, his new mountain artillery battery was in terrible shape. It had been created during the February 1916 Italian campaign and had been involved in the bloodiest encounters ever since. They had suffered many losses of men, horses, and material. Just before Mises took over, Romanian forces had destroyed their supply line for ammunition.⁶⁵ It looked as if someone in Vienna was bent on getting rid of Mises forever, and as things stood, the chances looked good that this someone would succeed.

On December 5, he joined his new unit, the Cannon Battery no. 1 of the Mountain Artillery Regiment no. 22 in the Romanian town of Rammcul Valcery (today Râmnicu Vâlcea). There he obtained a motor vehicle from the German army and moved on to Bucharest. He arrived in the Romanian capital on December 11, received his orders at the headquarters of the Prussian Army, and continued with his regiment to a summit position in the Carpathian Mountains, between Transylvania and the Bukovina.⁶⁶

It took three weeks to receive the first mail from Vienna.⁶⁷ His mother's parcels did not reach him at all, and she eventually had Franz Weiss, who held a position with the war administration, send them for her.⁶⁸ Meanwhile Mises discovered that the human body can endure amazingly low temperatures without fainting, and he renewed the painful acquaintance with his hip.⁶⁹

The news from Vienna did not help his morale. In mid-February, his Uncle Marcus had had a complete mental and physical breakdown, proving that Ludwig had grossly underestimated minimum living standards.⁷⁰ He also received a letter from Karl Pribram who had taken Mises's place at the Scientific Committee. Worried what Mises would think, Pribram wrote to give assurances that he had not pushed for his own nomination.⁷¹

Mises did not suffer from envy and was ready for continued sacrifice even in the face of such injustice. He was a good sport throughout his life. Yet one wonders what he must have felt in March 1917 when, freezing behind a cannon in the Carpathian Mountains, he received news from Perels that Karl Pribram had received the Ritterkreuz (Knight's Cross) and had moved on to a position as ministerial secretary in the Trade Ministry's department for social policies.

While the climatic conditions in the Carpathian Mountains were severe, the new mission was actually less dangerous and certainly less exciting than the first months of war on the Northern Front. The enemy troops were tired and hardly posed a threat, while there was increasing political resistance within Russia against the Tsar, and against continuing the war in particular. The Eastern Front was relatively quiet, and Mises had time to spend with his fellow officers discussing literature and economics.⁷²

On March 14, 1917, the Russian monarchy was overthrown, soon followed by a provisional government under Alexander Kerensky. Three weeks later, Woodrow Wilson, who had been reluctant to ally the United States to the ostensibly autocratic Russian Tsar, led his country into war on the side of the Entente. The old balances on the fronts were disrupted and the troops were repositioned.

In early April, Mises's battery moved to a new strategic position further north. It was also higher in altitude: they set up cannons at 6,000 feet.⁷³ The front remained quiet, however, and the men on both sides were increasingly difficult to motivate. Peace resolutions of the powerful social-democratic parties in Russia, Germany, and Austria had reinforced the general mood of increasing skepticism about the continuation of hostilities.

There were also other distractions, such as handling their new German neighbors. The problem was that the German Army was at least as arrogant as it was efficient. Even its regular soldiers had the tendency to treat foreign allies as incompetent junior partners. On at least one occasion, Mises himself had to confront pretentious German officers claiming jurisdiction over k.u.k. troops;⁷⁴ and after the war, when in a high-profile paper he analyzed the problems of the proposed Austro-German monetary unification, he mentioned “the tendency of the North Germans to consider anything South German and in particular anything Austrian to be inferior and alien.”⁷⁵

At the end of May and in early June 1917, Mises was in Vienna, probably on a two-week leave.⁷⁶ Here he could see firsthand the changes introduced under the new emperor. Karl was about to place his cronies in positions of military and political leadership. Displacing the old elite would have a political cost, but he tried to compensate by attempting to win greater popularity among the general public. Under Franz Joseph, nobody could get in touch with the emperor to discuss political matters except through His Majesty's ministers, but Karl opened his antechamber to anyone who wished to offer advice. It turned out that many of his subjects felt such a calling. Just among Mises's friends, Hans Kelsen and Joseph Schumpeter each wrote several memoranda in which they made detailed policy recommendations. Another witness of the events, Rudolf Sieghart, recalls: “There was a plethora of memoranda and audiences. Everybody gave counsel: Arch-Duchesses and priests, lower skirts and soutanes, profiteers and chats.”⁷⁷ The new government also convened the upper and lower chamber of the Austrian parliament for the first time in more than three years, on May 30. This too was part of the emperor's strategy to strengthen his bonds with the population—a necessity given the dramatic deterioration of living conditions in the past few months.

Mises was shocked to see how the food supply had collapsed during his six-month absence. He predicted that very soon no more food would be found at the markets, even after hours of standing in line. At one point his grandfather's cook stood three hours in line for meat. His mother had to dismiss her cook, Therese, because she could barely afford to feed her.⁷⁸ Sadder news was the loss of his old teacher, Eugen von Philippovich, who died on June 4 from a long illness.

With these impressions he left Vienna on June 9 to return to his battery.⁷⁹ He was back in time to prepare the last great action on the Eastern Front. Starting July 1, 1917 the united German and k.u.k. troops completed the re-conquest of the Bukovina in the wake of the so-called Kerensky offensive. At the end of July, Mises and his regiment reached their new permanent field of operations about 60 miles east of their initial position, in the area of Brusztury and Czardaki.⁸⁰ One month later, the war on the Eastern Front was virtually over and his regiment would receive recognition for its performance at the attack on Czardaki.⁸¹

Meanwhile, his colleagues from the Scientific Committee experienced the war under safer conditions. Mises knew it was the fate of political opponents to become marginalized within the state apparatus—and the ruling war party had an especially successful means of marginalization: it could send its opponents to the front. Still, it was exasperating to see how much the threat of combat intimidated the would-be intellectual leaders of the country. With the opposition to its expansionary plans silenced, and a technocratic elite composed of corrupt cowards, the Austrian war party had carte blanche within the government.

Mises did not capitulate. In the midst of the July battles, with biting pain in his hip,⁸² he somehow found the time to write for the Neue Freie Presse on public policy⁸³ His friends back in Vienna were grateful and amazed. Louise Sommer wrote him:

How I envy your proficiency in using the method of isolation to suppress disturbing personal problems.... I almost envy you your life of narrowly circumscribed activities. Surely you have time to work—you find time even in a shower of bullets.⁸⁴

Fortunately, Mises was not showered by bullets in the next two months—the regiment's July and early August battles were the last in the Bukovina. But this did not mean that Mises's frontline mission was over. His battery had orders to join the 1st Corps of the Austrian army on the Southern Front.⁸⁵

With additional troops newly available from the now-quiet Eastern Front, the k.u.k. Army prepared a new offensive against the Italians. The 12th Isonzo Battle in October and November 1917 would be Mises's last engagement in this war, and the last battle he would ever fight with guns. He spent six exhausting weeks on the Southern Front, under fire, enduring cold weather in the Alps, and still suffering a biting pain in his hip. On one of those days, his regiment was stationed on Hoch Rombon, a major peak in the area. Mises reported:⁸⁶ “thick fog and snow storm, 50 cm new snow, all ways are stuck, many electric cables are damaged and can be repaired only under life danger.” He also mentioned that his men had no more wood to burn and suffered from colds and rheumatism. Fortunately for him and his troops, this was just three days before the decisive breakthrough of the united German and Austro-Hungarian forces in a frontal attack against the better-equipped Italians, pushing them far back into the planes of Frioul and the Veneto.⁸⁷ One historian speculates that the “attackers would have moved even faster had they not paused to gorge their rumbling stomachs with the undreamt-of quantities of good Italian food and wine.”⁸⁸ What a way to escape, once more, the jaws of death.