Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (89 page)

‘Here, as everywhere,’ wrote Tolstoy, ‘it is the common people who really respond to the war. For example, women selling bread rolls and apples go to meet the hospital trains and give away half their wares to
wounded soldiers. Once, I saw a woman approach an officer whom I knew. She looked pityingly straight into his face, asked his name and promised to remember him in her prayers.’ Here, the writer identified a critical weakness of Russia’s war effort: the cynicism with which much of its ruling class treated the struggle, striving to spare themselves from its burdens and sacrifices. Moreover, many of the Tsar’s subjects nursed ethnic or religious grievances overlaid upon the general misery of campaigning. A Muslim conscript complained that while his Christian comrades-in-arms had their priests, he and his kind were denied such solace, ‘notwithstanding the fact that more than half the soldiers [in my unit] are Muslim, who die without mullahs, and are buried together with Russians in a single grave’.

But no man serving on either side in the Eastern campaign was content with its progress. In the German camp, Max Hoffmann was among those much troubled by failure sufficiently to concentrate force to achieve a decision on either front. ‘I would have liked to see us settle accounts conclusively with either France or Russia first,’ he wrote in his diary at Radom on 21 October. ‘If they had given us just two or three more corps I would have guaranteed that we should achieve that here. As it is, however, we must muddle along against vastly superior numbers.’ This complaint, which Ludendorff himself was to make with ever-increasing vehemence in Berlin, would become a German theme tune of the Eastern war: a little more, just give us a little more, and a triumph beckons. The Kaiser’s generals were almost certainly wrong: there was no prospect of victory until the Tsar’s armies had been battered, depleted, drained by years of attrition. But Russia’s human resources were by no means infinite, as their enemies sometimes supposed: for most of 1914–15, because of the shortcomings of the Tsar’s mobilisation, the rival forces were not hopelessly unequal – around eighty-four Austrian and German divisions against ninety-nine Russian. Meanwhile, indecision prevailed. In the northern sector of the front, late October found rival armies confronting each other, as Lt. Harald von der Marwitz put it, in ‘waterlogged trenches where we have one foot on German soil, the other in Russia’. His unit was deployed between the stone frontier markers dividing East Prussia from the Tsar’s empire, and was going nowhere in a hurry.

In western Europe, however, naïveté persisted about the allies’ prospects: every Russian advance caused hopes to soar. On 7 November the
New Statesman
thrilled to reports that ‘we may have only two or three weeks to wait before the main Russian armies are on German soil … We have the certain knowledge that Germany is beaten in the East, and cannot
hold her own against Russia with her present forces in that quarter.’ The
Illustrated London News
, in a display of credulous loyalty to Britain’s ally, carried a full-page portrait of Grand Duke Nicholas, which claimed that he was ‘executing unflinchingly plans which are covering Russian arms with glory’. The Grand Duke’s soldiers would have considered such praise extravagant: Nicholas himself was a mere figurehead, and the Russians were incapable of exploiting their autumn advantage in Galicia. The supply chain almost collapsed, and staff cars had to be commandeered to ferry forward crates of biscuit to feed the troops. An acute shell shortage developed, and St Petersburg issued a stream of contradictory directives.

On the other side, Falkenhayn dispatched a message to Conrad, explaining why it was difficult to shift more troops to the Eastern Front. This was carried by, of all people, Col. Richard Hentsch, the same who had been Moltke’s intermediary in the critical decisions of the Marne. Hentsch’s commission – he arrived at the Austrian headquarters in Galicia on 10 November – is significant, because it seems to confirm that he was considered to have correctly executed Moltke’s orders back in September on the Marne. The colonel would scarcely have been given such a job if he was deemed responsible for inflicting disaster on German arms. Now, he told Conrad that the Austrians were on their own.

But Hentsch should have called upon Hindenburg before addressing the Austrians. The German commander-in-chief and his chief of staff reached different conclusions. On 11 November they learned from an intercepted wireless message that the Stavka planned to renew the Russian invasion of Germany. Ludendorff, with or without further reinforcements from Falkenhayn, determined to pre-empt the enemy’s offensive with a thrust of his own. He launched a massive attack on the northern flank of Ivanov’s armies, precipitating what became known as the Battle of Łódź.

The Russians were as usual oblivious of the impending blow; their northernmost army commander, Rennenkampf, was probing towards East Prussia rather than guarding his flank to the west. The corps in the immediate path of the offensive collapsed with huge losses. Ruzsky, in overall command of the front, was slow to grasp the scale of the German offensive. By 18 November Łódź was almost encircled, the Russians contained within a perimeter approximately sixteen miles by eight. On the 19th, an almost hysterical galloper reached Fifth Army’s Gen. Phleve as he rode forward with his staff. ‘Your Excellency!’ the young officer cried out breathlessly, ‘The Second Army is surrounded and will be forced to surrender!’ Phleve gazed stonily at the messenger for a few seconds from under
his thick eyebrows, then said: ‘Have you come, Little Father, to play a tragedy or to make a report? If you have a report to make, make it to the chief of staff, but remember – no play-acting, or I place you under arrest.’ Having heard the news, both Phleve and his fellow army commander acted on their own initiative, diverting forces from the planned invasion of Germany to save Second Army’s bacon. They turned back towards Łódź with a most un-Russian celerity, miraculously arriving before the Germans. In an almost accidental fashion, which was characteristic of the campaign, seven Russian corps drifted into the path of the enemy’s vanguards approaching the city. Ludendorff had overreached himself, and indeed blundered: a quarter of a million of his own men faced more than double that number of Russians.

During the week of fighting that followed, the German offensive ran out of steam and ammunition. The Russians were much stronger, and occupied terrain favouring the defence. Three German divisions were cut off in the wooded hills east of the city, and on 22 November the Stavka ordered sixty trains to be ready to remove an expected 50,000 prisoners to PoW camps. On the evening of the 23rd, the German corps commander Freiherr von Scheffer-Boyadel radioed his army headquarters to say that he would attempt a breakthrough that night, otherwise ‘XXV Reserve Corps will cease to exist tomorrow’. Desperate fighting followed, and next morning at 0750 Scheffer radioed again: ‘No reserves left. Situation grave,’ followed ten minutes later by ‘desperately short of ammunition and rations. Immediate assistance … requested.’ In response August Mackensen, Ninth Army’s commander, dispatched two corps to the aid of Scheffer, whose men were able to cut their way out, bringing with them 16,000 Russian prisoners. On the evening of the 24th the forces met at Bshesiny, and the Russians were denied their coup. But Ludendorff’s offensive had been a failure, for all his boasts to the contrary. While the undoubted superior of his Russian opponents in military skill, as were most of his subordinates, Hindenburg’s chief of staff was nowhere near the mastermind he considered himself.

Ruzsky, though tactically successful in driving back Mackensen, was now running short of everything. A single Russian division had expended 2.15 million small-arms rounds in just three November days. Russia started the war with 5,000 guns and reserves of five million shells. By the end of 1914, the Tsar’s factories were producing 35,000 rounds a month – but the armies at the front were sometimes using 45,000 a day. On 1 December, only 300,000 shells remained in the dumps. Beyond
ammunition, the army lacked rifles and even boots, of which Ruzsky demanded half a million pairs. Carts scoured the battlefield, removing shoes from dead horses that were needed for live ones. The iron-hard ground assisted the movement of supplies, but repulsed the entrenching tools of both sides. In the deep snow, almost every wounded man froze to death before he could be evacuated. Even without the intervention of shells and bullets, some men expired from the sheer overnight cold in their trenches. Aircraft made only short flights, because pilots swiftly became incapable of moving their hands to operate the controls, though the Germans maintained nuisance bombing raids on Warsaw. Both sides experienced a steady stream of desertions. Even though the German attack had been stopped in its tracks, the Russian invasion of Germany was plainly not going to happen. Ludendorff told his masters that he had won another great victory. In truth, he had merely mauled some Russian formations, but his prestige stood sufficiently high to persuade Falkenhayn to send him four more corps from the West.

Further south, among the Austrians, after four months of hardship, defeat and deplorable leadership, morale remained low. The Hapsburg Empire’s generals waltzed better than they fought, and lacked the slightest awareness of what man-management meant. When Constantin Schneider reported to his corps commander in Cracow on 29 November, after so long in the field he was traumatised to find himself once more in civilisation: ‘it seemed as if military life stopped at the edge of the city. One felt wafted by magic away from the war. The streets were brilliantly lit up … A wholly new life that had become alien to me suddenly pulsed all around, so that I seemed translated from a dream into reality. Here were people who did not wear uniforms, pursuing tranquil activities: women in fashionable clothes; officers wearing peacetime black caps and garrison uniforms. It was strange to reflect that just two hours earlier Russian shrapnel was falling around me, in the midst of a dead zone of devastation that extended for many kilometres beyond the suburbs of this living, vital city.’ Schneider found corps headquarters established in a grand hotel. Himself filthy and wearing a threadbare uniform, he was embarrassed to mingle with washed, polished, impeccably dressed staff officers. From them he heard momentous tidings: German reinforcements had arrived, and were even then detraining. ‘This news gave everyone new hope, that victory was possible.’

In truth, the fresh forces sufficed only to prevent an absolute Austrian collapse, assisted by disarray in the Russian camp. There was renewed
squabbling between the Tsar’s generals: in the south, Ivanov wanted to launch a new attack against the Austrians, but this could only happen if his neighbour protected his right flank, which Ruzsky had no interest in doing. It was left to the Austrians, instead, to attempt a new offensive early in December. This achieved some initial success, inspiring in Conrad excitement verging upon euphoria, and causing him to announce a victory. Constantin Schneider found the advance almost worse than retreat: ‘the defeated … do not see the victims of war. The victor, obliged to cross the battlefield, catches sight of them and shudders.’ He described a symbolic encounter in those days, when he came upon a Russian and an Austrian who lay where they had been striving to bayonet each other, only to be killed by the same shell. As usual, Conrad’s brief success came to nothing: he could not follow through. The Russians counter-attacked. As the year approached its end, Austrian forces found themselves once more pushed back onto the lower slopes of the Carpathians.

Both sides were pursuing incoherent strategies. Falkenhayn recognised that the war would be won or lost in the West. On 26 November he wrote to
Ober Ost
– the high command in Poland: ‘Any victories gained in the east at the cost of [success on] the Western Front are worthless.’ Such strictures did not deter Hindenburg and Ludendorff from maintaining insistent demands for reinforcements, and in the wake of failure at Ypres, for which Falkenhayn was deemed personally responsible, their prestige stood higher than his. Political imperatives exercised stronger influence than military ones, in persuading the Germans to send more troops east. The Central Powers were morbidly anxious that if they seemed to be losing the Eastern campaign, neutral states might throw in their lot with the allies. Berlin and Vienna were fearful that not only Italy might enter the war against them, but Bulgaria and Romania likewise. Even larger loomed the spectral consequences of an absolute Austro-Hungarian defeat. While the commanders of both Tsar Nicholas and Emperor Franz Joseph were incompetent, and their forces ill-equipped for modern war, the Hapsburg armies were in worse case. Russian troops, on their day and especially in defence, fought well; the Austrians hardly ever did. Henceforward, German activism on the Eastern Front was inspired chiefly by anxiety to keep Austria-Hungary in the war.

The Austrian army’s miserable showing reflected its institutional contempt for military science, notably including logistics. Conrad’s 1913–14 war games – the
Grosse Etappenkriegsspiel
– had supposedly addressed
the very issues now at stake on the battlefield: deployment and supply of several army corps in Galicia. But an instructor named Theodor von Siegringen, who argued that logistics would prove a critical operational factor in a region of few roads and railways, was removed as a troublemaker. Franz Joseph’s soldiers suffered infinite hardship and grief in the winter of 1914 because their commanders refused responsibly to address their feeding and welfare. Lt. Aleksandr Trushnovich, a Slovenian, described the miserable rations issued to his soldiers – black bread, meatless stew, black coffee substitute – ‘they were almost starving’. Meanwhile he and his fellow officers ‘received more calories than the entire company – wine and cake, also cigarettes and cigars which I gave to the men. Such inequality seemed revolting, in trenches where we were all obviously equals in the face of death.’

The Austrians waged fantasy warfare. A German officer watching their troops straggle forward one day in December damned their march discipline as ‘clumsy’ – ‘
hanebüchen
’ – contrasted with German units in rigorous formation. It was a minor curiosity of the campaign that up to forty of Conrad’s ‘men’ in Galicia are thought to have been women. It was not uncommon in pre-war Eastern Europe for women to empower themselves by donning masculine garb and masquerading as men, and some commanding officers tolerated the presence of women in the ranks, even when their sex was revealed. One identified example was that of Polish-Viennese artist Zofia Plewińska, nineteen in 1914, who enlisted under the name of Leszek Pomianowski. She was posted to the front at Lipnica Murowana in December, and thereafter served in action.