Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (70 page)

Conrad, ignoring the fact that the Germans intended to mount only a holding operation in the east until France was disposed of, embarked upon a massively ambitious envelopment in Poland. To achieve this, in August he committed thirty-one divisions against the Russians’ forty-five infantry and eighteen cavalry formations. The Tsar’s armies were able to deploy rapidly in southern Poland, partly because they set troops in motion before full mobilisation was ordered, and partly because they had lavished French cash on upgrading rail track. Austrian movements were sluggish by comparison: Conrad had planned on dispatching an initial 11,000 trains, but instead could activate only 1,942, which crawled across the Empire at 10 mph, half the speed of German ones. Troop trains halted for six hours a day for their occupants to be fed. Incompetence
transcended parody: the stationmaster at Podborze in Austrian Silesia suffered a breakdown, reversed all the signals causing some formations to be delayed for hours, then shot himself during the ensuing investigation.

The four Hapsburg armies dispatched to Galicia were decanted from rail wagons far behind the front and obliged to complete their deployments on foot, covering twenty miles each day between 19 and 26 August. Some men viewed the forthcoming campaign with the same naïveté as their leaders. Lt. Edler von Hoefft led a fighting patrol forward of the Austrian army, which glimpsed Cossacks two kilometres away, then allowed them to close to 1,200 metres before loosing a fusillade. One Russian fell, to the Austrians’ exultation. ‘Of course everybody claimed to have hit him,’ wrote Hoefft. ‘My riflemen said: “Wasn’t it great, the way he rolled over?”’

Forty-four-year-old Dr Richard von Stenitzer, who had abandoned a fashionable Vienna practice to become an army medical officer, arrived at the front with only a small valise because ‘it is said that the campaign could only last a few months’. But staff officer Alexander Pallavicini – Berchtold’s acquaintance – was gloomy from the start: ‘This is a sad “success” for our diplomacy, which always calculated on [fighting] only Serbia.’ He resorted to French in his diary: ‘Now, the words are
ordre
,
contreordre
,
désordre
.’ When Lt. Col. Theodor Ritter von Zeynek said farewell to his wife in Vienna before joining an army staff in Galicia, he felt as if he was ‘jumping into a thick cloudbank’. Poland, western salient of the Tsarist Empire, became one of the war’s most exotic battlefields. John Reed painted a vivid portrait of the diversity of its native inhabitants, now overrun by soldiers from every corner of Nicholas II’s possessions – ‘the dramatic pageant of races’, as the American journalist called it:

There were subdued, gentle Moldavian peasants all in white linen, with wide-brimmed, low-crowned hats and long, curling hair falling on their shoulders … Russian
mujiks
in blouses and peaked caps clumped along with heavy boots – bearded giants with blank, simple faces, and hale, flat-faced Russian women dressed in ghastly combinations of coloured kerchiefs and shirts … Here and there the twisted, calculating face of a Russian pope, with his long hair, and a great crucifix dancing on the front of his robe. Cossacks of the Don, without distinctive uniform excepting a broad red stripe down their trousers, silver-inlaid sabre with the guardless hilt, and tufted love-lock over the left eye; pockmarked Tartars, descendants of the Golden Horde who stormed Holy Moscow – the strong men of the army – marked by a narrow red stripe; Turcomans in enormous white or black bearskins, caftans of faded violet or blue, boots with pointed toes turned up – splendid with gold chains, belts, daggers and yataghans, and always Jews, Jews, Jews.

This was the teeming society, at the interface of a multitude of races and rival loyalties, upon which three armies descended in August 1914. Even while Austrian Lt. Constantin Schneider was still on Hapsburg territory it seemed to him that not only the landscape but the demeanour of every soldier changed when his regiment’s train approached the Carpathian mountains: ‘The high command had marked a line on the map to denote the beginning of the theatre of war, and even nature wore another aspect. The peaceful world ended, the lush fields where hardworking farmhands gathered the harvest were abandoned, the gay city life was left behind … Told that the train might stop, we roused ourselves from poetic dreams and became … dashing heroes, loading our pistols and awaiting the coming of morning armed to the teeth.’

Once through the Carpathian passes, Franz Joseph’s army entered the frontier region, studded with huge city-fortresses – Lemberg, Przemyśl, Cracow; thereafter, the Austrians advanced towards the Russians on foot. Constantin Schneider’s division was accompanied by six hundred baggage carts. He deplored the stupidity of their untrained civilian drivers, who refused to keep to the left side of the road assigned to them: ‘We were constantly distracted by wrangles which caused halts, difficulty, reproaches.’ On both sides of the Polish border, roads were poor and railways few. Conrad’s supply columns, which purported to be joining a twentieth-century war, moved no faster than those of the nineteenth.

The Austrians advanced to meet the Russians on two fronts: one a hundred miles south of Warsaw, beyond the San river, the other eastwards, straddling the Dniester. In the latter sector, the Austrians were outnumbered three to one. But when Nikolai Ruzsky, the Russian commander, suffered sharp losses in the first clashes after venturing warily into Hapsburg Galicia, he fell back inside Poland. Meanwhile Russian army commanders received irrational and indeed contradictory orders from rivals for authority: army headquarters – the Stavka – presided over by Grand Duke Nicholas and his staff; St Petersburg; and Gen. Nicholas Ivanov, the Front commander. The generals in the field resolved the confusion about who was in charge by doing whatever seemed best to each on the day, heedless of what courses their neighbours might be pursuing.
Senior officers indulged mutual animosities without inhibition or embarrassment. If the tension between Samsonov and Rennenkampf was most notorious, in Galicia Col. Guliewicz, an aristocratic Pole and court favourite serving as chief of staff to Ninth Army, refused to speak to Gen. Lechitsky, his Siberian commander, whom he despised as an incorrigible vulgarian, because the latter declined to allow Guliewicz’s wife to live at their headquarters.

Ruzsky, a chronic pessimist, faced an Austrian army, but was meanwhile obsessed by fears that the Germans further north might descend on Warsaw, then advance towards St Petersburg. He thus favoured withdrawing his own command to the river Niemen. Some of the forts and bridges of Warsaw were blown up in gloomy anticipation of such an outcome. Meanwhile, 350,000 Russians advanced south-west from Lublin onto Austrian soil, where Conrad had deployed a similar number of his own troops, both sides looting and burning indiscriminately. Here was territory new to the conflict, where the population had not yet adjusted to its cruel demands. At Opole, only the altar and cross survived from a church that was still burning, while bricks from its bell-tower littered the surrounding fields, scored with abandoned Austrian trenches. By contrast, a mile or two onwards, advancing Russian troops passed families in their Sunday best walking to church as usual, while children cavorted and splashed in a village pond. In the Austrian camp Constantin Schneider gazed curiously upon Galicia’s onion-dome churches and strange place-names, reflecting, ‘the Orient had to be like this. For sure, we had ventured far from Europe.’

Staff officer Edler Hoefft faced his first Russian barrage on 15 August. The peasant cottage where he was billeted received a direct hit, ‘horses reared up, people ran and I was sure some poor devils had copped it’. Yet when the shelling stopped, he was amazed to discover that only one man had been wounded, hit in the knee. He wrote: ‘It must be that God makes miracles, because otherwise no human beings would survive.’ They learned the lesson of all battlefields, that while shellfire might be dangerous, it did not result in universal annihilation, as from a distance appeared inevitable.

Allied military attachés posted to the South-Western Front were greeted on arrival by Russian commanders and staff officers with the kisses so distasteful to Britain’s Maj. Gen. Alfred Knox. They found their hosts drinking sweet lemonade without much enthusiasm: Ivanov had banned alcohol from his mess for the duration, an innovation which seemed to assist neither morale nor efficiency. But the general was popular among his soldiers, with whom he chatted constantly. A huge gunner said that he had left at home a wife and five children. His genial commander assured him that he would see them again. The man responded sombrely: ‘They say it is a wide road that leads to the war and only a narrow path that leads home again.’

The morning of 19 August found Ivanov watching his army advance through a torrential downpour. At halts, men unwrapped their filthy footrags, laying them out to dry when the rain stopped. A few younger soldiers sang the sort of songs the army favoured:

I remember when I was a young girl

During the army manoeuvres

To my village came a young officer

With soldiers and he said to me

Give me some water to drink

When he finished drinking,

He stooped from his horse

And kissed me.

All night he was in my dreams.

But an eyewitness noted that ‘the expression of most of the men was one of dull, unreasoning misery’. Alfred Knox also observed that many of the army’s horses, newly requisitioned from farms and stables, were too small for such heavy labour as dragging guns, and too fresh to be easily handled by men inexperienced in animal management. A horse in the Russian army was officially entitled to a daily ration of 14¾lb of oats, 15lb of hay, 4lb of straw – a third more than the peacetime allocation, in recognition of the fact that the poor brutes were being worked so hard. In reality, however, horses were even less likely than men to be decently fed, and they foundered by thousands in consequence.

On 23 August Yanushkevich, the Front chief of staff, declared buoyantly to Ivanov: ‘the Austrian forces ranged against us are weaker than those we war-gamed against’. Yet in the next three days, carelessly deployed Russian formations met the enemy with flanks exposed – and received a mauling. Ivanov’s men headed smartly back up the road by which they had advanced, to new positions at Kraśnik. Next day, Austrian Edler Hoefft and a comrade found themselves in a churchyard which had been occupied by Russian troops caught in an artillery concentration. Many of the
dead lay unburied: ‘the air was poisoned and a man had to hold his breath … Everywhere thick walls had fallen in and huge craters overlapped each other. The victims lay around, in one place seven heaped together. One lacked an abdomen, another had lost his head excepting a lower jaw. A third lacked shoulders and hips. It was worse than gruesome. Wenze took photographs of everything while I quit the place, holding my nose.’

On the Austrian side, among the first to die in Galicia was Gen. Alexander von-Brosch Aarenau, one of the senior officers who had been most eager for war. On 21 August, disdaining reconnaissance, he led a dense formation of
Kaiserjäger
troops into an attack on the Russians, which precipitated a slaughter in which he became merely the most notable of many casualties. Austrian soldiers complained that their grey uniforms, which blended well into mountain terrain, rendered them conspicuous on the flatlands of Galicia. The Russians, by contrast, clad in brown, were scarcely visible on ploughland until they moved.

Franz Joseph’s army experienced chronic language difficulties. On several occasions men of a division recruited from Bohemia opened fire on comrades of a neighbouring formation, supposing them to be the enemy – which was understandable, since they spoke only Serbo-Croat. Constantin Schneider led a reconnaissance patrol towards the Russians, in the course of which he met a troop of Hapsburg hussars with whom he was desperate to exchange information. Unfortunately, however, not one of the horsemen spoke or understood the German of Schneider’s Tyroleans. On the night of 28 August, a cavalry regiment approached the lines of an Austrian division. ‘Cossacks!’ screamed one man, a cry that was taken up by a hundred voices, and followed by a furious fusillade towards the enemy, invisible in the darkness. Next morning, Schneider explored the ground before the formation’s positions, and was appalled by what he found: ‘The ravine was filled with corpses … men of our hussar regiment, shot not by the enemy but by our own infantry. The grotesquery of it almost made me scream.’ Once again, the disaster was caused by a failure of communications: the German-speaking infantrymen thought the hussars’ unfamiliar shouts were Russian.

Misery descended upon the region’s civilian inhabitants, for whom neither side cared a fig; thatched wooden peasant huts were torched without discrimination. ‘You see only the stone foundations of houses, and the stoves left in their midst,’ wrote Edler Hoefft. ‘Chimneys line the roads like ghostly gravestones. Every tree is scorched from the awful fires, its leaves withered.’ The Russians destroyed railway stations and bridges as they
retreated, while felling trees and digging ditches across roads to delay the Austrians’ passage. A sudden outbreak of rifle fire near a big manor house at Suwałki caused a servant to drop the soup tureen which he was carrying into the dining room for his noble master’s lunch. Soon, owners and servants alike were forced to flee. Behind the front in Lublin, war correspondent Sergei Kondurashkin was surprised to find himself hailed by the driver of a peasant cart, accompanied by his wife. The man turned out to be an acquaintance who was a landowner and a former member of the State Council; the Austrians had burned his country mansion. The refugee squire gestured hopelessly to the back of the cart, containing a basket and a chair: ‘This is all we’ve got left. We’re looking for shelter.’