Fall of Empires:
The Imperial & Royal Army
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
November 2024

The Austrian Empire’s Imperial-Royal Army formally ceased to exist in 1868, to be replaced by the Imperial and Royal Army of Austria-Hungary, the subtle name change giving a nod to Hungarian equality with the “Imperial half” of the Dual Monarchy (informally called “Austria”). In addition, each half of the Monarchy would field a second-line force, the Imperial-Royal Landwehr and the Royal Hungarian Honvédség.

The new Common Army, as it was informally known, would be based on sixteen corps districts. Before the 1866 Austro-Prussian War, men had been conscripted for a nominal eight years of service plus two more in the reserves; in practice, most men were furloughed after less than two years with the colors. The wealthy could buy their way out, and the Army came to depend on the hard cash generated by the Stellvertreterfond – supposedly this money was to benefit the rank and file, but it came to be used as part of the general budget.

For the first time, Austria-Hungary introduced nominal universal conscription. All regions and ethnic groups were now liable for service, including Jews; the Imperial and Royal Army recognized languages and ethnic groups, but not nationalities. All men were required to draw lots on 1 January of the year in which their 19th birthday fell; those pulling low numbers went to the Common Army, those with middle numbers to the Landwehr or Honvédség, and those with high numbers were exempted outright, with a theoretical obligation to serve in an emergency and otherwise subject to recall only in wartime.

Formerly, a broad range of exemptions had kept the middle and upper classes out of the ranks; and if a young man did not qualify for one of those his family could always buy him out. Those no longer applied; nobles, property owners, merchants all had to serve, though those with the proper educational background could fulfill their service obligation by obtaining a reserve officer’s commission as a one-year volunteer. By the 1880’s the Dual Monarchy’s Jewish proportion came to five percent of the total population, but 18 percent of the reserve officer corps.

A conscript served for 12 years. If drawn into the Common Army, he did three years as a regular, seven as a reservist and his final two years as a reservist with the Landwehr or Honvédség. If drafted directly into either of the national armies, he served two years as a regular and then ten as a reservist. Afterwards, he would be liable for wartime service in the Landsturm or, in the Hungarian half of the Monarchy, the Royal Hungarian Népfelkelö, a third-line unorganized reserve force.

Recruits swore an oath to the Emperor or King, depending on the half of the Monarchy where they were inducted, promising to “live and die with honor.” In another concession to the Hungarians, the Landwehr and Honvédség troops also swore to uphold and defend their respective constitutions.

Just how many men would be called to serve, as opposed to exempted, depended on the size of the annual recruit contingent. This was set by the Delegations, the joint committee of the Austrian and Hungarian parliaments the set the budgets for common institutions at 10-year intervals. Unwilling to give up this political leverage, the Hungarians insisted on a total number of recruits (initially 95,000, of which 55,000 came from Austria and 40,000 from Hungary) rather than a percentage of the total population.

As Austria-Hungary’s population exploded in the last decades of the 19th Century – as did those of most European nations – the number of young men drawn into the Army remained the same; no increases in the annual intake occurred between 1889 and 1912. By the time Austria-Hungary started to conscript a proportion of her population in keeping with the annual classes of other European powers, it was much too late to have an impact before the outbreak of the First World War.

The heart of the Common Army’s identity remained its infantry and cavalry regiments. The retained their traditional Inhaber, or colonel-proprietor, but the Inhaber lost his rights of recommending officers for promotion and became solely an honorary position. A number of regiments had no living proprietor at all but took the name of a famous earlier Colonel, like Budapest’s 32nd “Maria Theresa” Infantry Regiment. Even without the proprietor system the old “House regiments” retained enhanced prestige and still attracted the best young officers and usually drew the most desirable garrisons.

In 1915 the Army did away with the colonel-proprietors, both living and dead; all regiments would be referred to solely by number. In practice, most officers continued to refer to regiments by name rather than number (for example, “Rainier” appears in reports rather than “59th” until the end of the war) and regimental staffs were allowed to sue their existing stocks of letterhead and forms with the old designations, which somehow were continually replenished.

In 1883 the new chief of the general staff Friedrich von Beck introduced a new territorial recruiting system. The old Grenzer regiments of the Military Border had finally been demilitarized in 1871 and lost their last administrative functions in 1881; now the Croat-Serb communities would be subject to conscription like any others in the Dual Monarchy. The number of infantry regiments rose from 80 to 102, with each existing regiment providing one of its battalions and eight light infantry (Feldjäger) battalions converting to infantry. Each regiment received a geographic district for recruiting, which overlapped with districts for the remaining 32 Feldjäger battalions.

Those regimental districts in turn made up divisional districts, which combined to make corps districts, the heart of the peacetime army’s administration. These districts provided the manpower not only for the infantry and cavalry, but for the artillery, engineers and all other specialist branches. While a radical change for the Habsburg armed forces, this arrangement mirrored that of the other European Great Powers.

No longer would troops be stationed far away from their homes; regiments were assigned their own recruiting grounds surrounding their home station. Many regiments served in frontier garrisons or in the Monarchy’s large cities, but no longer were they purposefully kept away from their recruiting grounds for political reasons. Of the 102 infantry regiments, 89 were stationed in their home districts, as well as 31 of 42 cavalry regiments.

The Imperial and Royal Army would mobilize for war in the summer of 1914 under that same organization, which initially provided 30 infantry divisions. By 1914 some re-organization (mostly, the formation of mountain brigades from detached battalions of other regiments) and the addition of four Bosnian regiments had increased that to 34 infantry divisions; Landwehr and Honvédség divisions were numbered in the same sequence.

The international crisis over the 1908 annexation of Bosnia-Hercegovina brought emergency funding that the Army used to set up an additional corps command (XVI, based in Dalmatia and Hercegovina) and to add machine-gun detachments to the infantry regiments and Feldjäger battalions. Each regimental detachment had four sections, each with two machine guns; the Feldjäger battalions received a section of two guns. No additional manpower was provided for these new units; the Army command compensated with reductions to the logistics sections (which would be felt in 1914).

Had the Common Army been able to increase the induction of new recruits at the same pace at which the Dual Monarchy’s population grew, feeding, training and equipping them would have been extremely difficult. Austria-Hungary spent much less than the other Great Powers on her military. The 1873 world-wide financial crisis hit Austria-Hungary particularly hard, and the government incurred large-scale expenses taking over the bankrupt railway system. Military spending never recovered its former levels, while in some years the railroads consumed more government funds than the Army.

Additionally, the dual system almost invited obstruction, as the Hungarians used that leverage to extract national concessions. The Emperor stoutly refused their demands to totally divide the Army between the two halves of the Empire or allow the Hungarians – who were only a plurality, not a majority, in the Kingdom of Hungary – to use the Army as a means to magyarize Croat, Romanian, Slovak and Ruthenian recruits. Both the Austrian and Hungarian parliaments proved more willing to spend on their own national armies, which grew to become front-line forces by 1912.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published an uncountable number of books, games and articles on historical subjects; a few of them were actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children and his dog, Leopold. Leopold enjoys gnawing his deer antler and editing Wikipedia pages.