The Eastern Front 1914-1917 (21 page)

The central one of these three corps—20. (Bulgakov)—was to be surrounded. X Army command should have ordered retreat in time, but it did not know what was happening. Only on 14th February did Yepanchin announce himself from Kovno, wondering what had happened to his division. Until then, the whole of the German X Army was thought to be ‘about a corps’. Yepanchin’s feebleness was considered responsible for what had happened. In any case, since Ruzski felt that the main German blow was that of VIII Army, towards Osowiec, on 11th February he ordered XII Army to prepare for a counter-offensive with this in mind. The central corps of X Army were told not to retreat, in case they endangered the new manoeuvre. Only on 14th February was a retreat begun—the southernmost corps occupying one road, the northernmost one the other, so that the central one had to stand and fight. By the time it could withdraw, German troops had already penetrated the forests of Augustów in its rear, and controlled the roads. Conditions were such that the Russian groups that did escape were unaware of 20. Corps’s fate, and so did little to help. Four German corps gathered in a circle around Bulgakov’s group, and between 16th and 21st February it was pressed closer and closer—in the end, two divisional staffs being forced to use the same forester’s hut. From battle-casualties and stragglers, regiments ran down to a few hundreds, instead of three thousand men—in the case of 105th Orenburg regiment, to less than a hundred. On 21st February Bulgakov surrendered, with 12,000 men, most of them wounded. This was given out by Ludendorff as a new Tannenberg, and so it appears in his memoirs. There was talk of 100,000 prisoners; in practice, the figure was 56,000 for losses of all types in the Russian X Army, although since most of 20. Corps’s guns were lost, the Germans took 185 guns.
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German losses have not been revealed.

This was a tactical success like many others in the First World War—barren of strategic consequence. It led the Germans to extend their flank into Russian territory; yet there could be no advance to the east without security towards the south, and much of VIII Army had to be diverted into besieging the fortress of Osowiec (from mid-February to early
March). This failed: Osowiec was well-defended, and enjoyed a position of some strength, commanding the few ways across marshes of the Bobr. It provided an object-lesson in the proper rôle of fortresses in the First World War: its various works were not strong and the defenders could not, therefore, have many illusions—they were almost forced to a flexible defence based on field-positions, and the Germans, despite an expenditure of shell calculated to be 250,000, failed to make progress.
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Further west, there were German attacks from East Prussia against the newly-forming XII Army. On 24th February a well-executed manoeuvre against the town of Przasnysz resulted in capture of 30,000 Russians; but an equally-well executed manoeuvre on the Russian side resulted in capture of 30,000 Germans a week later, with sixty guns. Early in March, the pressure of XII and X Armies resulted in a German withdrawal to the frontiers. Tactical successes had balanced each other out, and Ludendorff, with forty-two and a half divisions to sixty-four, decided to abandon further schemes. At bottom, Falkenhayn had been right: the winter offensives had been foolhardy.

The Russian offensives had also failed to produce much result. Grand Duke Nicholas opposed any further attack on East Prussia ‘where we should simply be exposed to the East Prussian railway-network’. Ruzski was told to take up a good defensive position. He protested, but received word that the Grand Duke’s ‘will’ was ‘unflinching’. What this meant was that Ivanov and
Stavka
had now taken up a different scheme—a renewed Carpathian offensive. If Ruzski were to be pushed onto the defensive, it would be sensible for him to abandon the more exposed parts of the Russian line in the central theatre. But the Grand Duke would not have this, because it could weaken the south-western position. Ruzski was left holding a front longer than needed, and his troops were committed to it such that few reserves could be created. When
Stavka
elected to launch a further Carpathian attack, Ruzski’s nerve cracked: he resigned, alleging ‘extreme exhaustion, brought on by general weakening of the organism’. Alexeyev—supposed by the Grand Duke to be more sympathetic to
Stavka’s
plans—took his place, towards the end of March.

By then, various factors arose to require a Carpathian offensive, to knock out Austria-Hungary.
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First, there was the simple failure to produce ‘decision’ on the German front. There was also the prospect of an Anglo-French coup against the Dardanelles, an opening-up of the Balkan theatre and the intervention of Italy. It was clear that Russia’s political and military interests ‘powerfully demanded’ concentration against Austria-Hungary: Russians, rather than Italians, or French clients such as the Romanians, should take Budapest. Moreover, this was the Russians’ only way of helping the western Powers in the eastern Mediterranean.
The Russian front against Turkey was far to the east, in the Caucasus, and although, here, the Russian army generally had the better part, supply-difficulties prevented any deep penetration of Turkish territory. In any case, most people, German and Russian, assumed that the Dardanelles would be opened up by the British—the Russian Council of Ministers, for instance, ordering coal from England on the supposition that it could be transported through the Dardanelles.
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Ivanov was therefore instructed, just before the fall of Przemyśl, to complete the ruin of Austria-Hungary. But, typically, he was not given enough force for this. Two-thirds of the Russian army remained frozen on the other front. Alexeyev, far from sympathising with Ivanov, as before, now adopted in redoubled form the policies of Ruzski, and resisted suggestions that he should part with troops. A second-line division was at last extracted from him; and he promised, also, 3. Caucasus Corps—although it took a month to arrive, even then requiring a ‘categorical order’. Ivanov thus had barely over thirty divisions for his Carpathian offensive. To make up, he took troops from his own sector of the central theatre; but, because of a need to impress Romania, they were sent, together with others, to the remote, sometimes inaccessible Bukovina, and spent the next month in forming a new, IX, Army. The troops of February were reinforced, in the Carpathians, only by three second-line divisions, drawn from the former blockading army at Przemyśl; otherwise, III Army could only weaken its right wing, on the Dunajec-Biala positions near Cracow, in order to create sufficient force, for the attack of its left wing in the mountains.

The Carpathian operation went on in much the same conditions as before—‘a labyrinth of mountains’, with periods of thaw more frequent now, than before. The Russian forces were hardly stronger than the Austro-Hungarian ones, at least in terms of divisions. In terms of morale, there was, however, a great difference. In its March offensive, the Austrian II Army had lost heavily—52,000 men in the week preceding Ivanov’s attack, 17,000 of them from frost-bite.
Südarmee
had lost two-thirds of its strength. The Austrian IΙI Army, to the west, had also been hard-hit. Windischgrätz, Austrian liaison officer with German troops, said that 10. Corps was ‘no good at all’; in II Army ‘the mood is very bad’; in Teschen, Conrad’s headquarters, the mood was ‘below zero. The chief never stops grumbling’.
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Russian attacks came in a series of short jabs through the valleys, broken off for lack of force after they had won initial successes. This, in mountain-conditions, was an excellent way of proceeding, for the Russians completely confused Austrian reserves without, themselves, running into insuperable supply-difficulties. Yet the Austrian commanders could not afford the general retreat that might have saved things:
once they lost the mountains, they thought, they would be pushed back on Budapest. Their armies stayed in the mountains, losing thousands of prisoners. An attack on III Army produced crisis; appeals went from Conrad to Ludendorff and Falkenhayn; by 6th April a new German force—
Beskidenkorps
, under Marwitz—was made up of troops from Ludendorff’s front and
Südarmee
(two and a half divisions). Its intervention, together with the problems of supply brought by the Russians’ advance, brought the Carpathian offensive to a halt. On 10th April, Ivanov stopped it, explaining: high losses, exhaustion, thawing of the roads that produced impassability, and snow had brought things to a halt; even the most essential supplies could be brought up ‘only with the greatest difficulty’. He also complained, not wrongly, that inactivity on the rest of the front had allowed the Germans to send in reserves. Even so, the operation should be renewed. More troops must come; and the new IX Army, assembling on the Dniester, would bring decisive results. In this way, mid-April found the south-western command in a mood to capture Budapest.

CHAPTER SIX
The Austro-Hungarian Emergency

In January 1915 Ludendorff had told Falkenhayn, ‘Austria’s emergency is our great incalculable’; and by spring, with the fall of Przemyśl, the Habsburg Monarchy appeared to have reached the limit of its endurance. The Austro-Hungarian army was small, badly-armed, badly-led; the Carpathian front brought an uninterrupted tale of woe. Cramon, German liaison officer, reported to Falkenhayn that the Austrians were ‘exhausted, rotten’. II Army had lost two-thirds of its men; ‘then there is the business of the unreliability of some nationalities’. It became more and more difficult for the army leaders to count on Czech or Ruthene troops in battle against Russia. Slav troops ran through their commanders’ hands and, after the Carpathian campaign, it became clear that the Austro-Hungarian army could only survive with German help. The
Beskidenkorps
of early April could only be a stop-gap, for the imminence of Italian entry into the war would make the Habsburg Monarchy’s military position impossible.

The weakness of Austria-Hungary was no great surprise to anyone, but it ought not to have reached such dimensions: Austria-Hungary contained over fifty million inhabitants, and her war-industry, with Skoda and Steyr, should have been able to produce a more respectable war-effort. To start with, too, there was not even such sign of dissidence on the part of potentially rebellious peoples, such as the Czechs: rather the contrary. But the Habsburg Monarchy had become incapable of harnessing its peoples’ energies. A hopeless muddle was made of conscription. Before the war, not more than a fifth of the liable young men were ever conscripted, and less than a fifth received full training, because there was no money to keep more than that, and because the army leaders shrank from the creative effort of turning hundreds of thousands of peasant youths, with fifteen different languages, into serious soldiers. In 1914, 3,500,000 men were called up—virtually the whole of the trained reserve, and a section of the untrained territorial army. Losses knocked out a substantial proportion of these—to the end of 1914, 1,250,000, and a further 800,000
to March 1915. Services in the rear took up the activities of most of the rest, and in the early months of 1915 Austria-Hungary was really relying on the 1914 class of conscripts, together with some untrained territorials. The army at the front therefore ran down—not much above 250,000 in December 1914, and not 500,000 in April 1915. Anticipated conscription of the class of 1915, and hasty conscription of classes of territorial troops, made up some of the gap, but in spring 1915 there was a severe man-power crisis.
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In matters of war-economy, too, there was a crisis, owing mainly to slipshod pre-war arrangements, No provision had been made for a war lasting more than a few weeks, and manufacture of munitions was woefully low. When the Allies set up their blockade, the foreign trade on which the authorities had calculated naturally came to an end. But the authorities had little idea as to what might take its place, and went on counting on the Germans’ sending them what they needed—although of course the Germans needed every scrap of shell they produced. Austrian production had even been cut back, because of cartel-agreements with German firms. In this way, prices would rise, and the Austrian firms would profit because they held shares in the German ones. Moreover, it was difficult for the Austrians to produce munitions by mass-production, because a large part of their artillery was old-fashioned. The army against Russia had had less than 2,000 guns to the Russians’ 3,000; even so, there were forty-five different types of gun, each needing different munitions; and a further problem was that many guns were made of bronze which, though much less efficient than steel, lasted longer and therefore suited the exiguous pre-war army budgets. The authorities blundered about in a fog: imagining at one moment that they could modernise the whole of their artillery at a stroke, and then finding that their resources had to be frittered away on endless separate artillery and munitions-programmes. The tone of their summaries of their own activities is one of unshakable self-satisfaction. Just the same, their performance was woeful—116,000 rounds produced in the whole of December 1914, as against a minimal demand of 240,000 per week. Austrian shell-output never reached more than one million rounds per month, even in 1916, when the Germans produced seven million, and even the Russians more than four. However, low shell-output was made at least supportable, because the out-put of artillery, for allied reasons, remained low also. The artillery section of the Vienna war ministry was the most characteristically Viennese of them all: more and more complicated, for less and less return. Problems of labour and raw materials were serious, as in other countries, but the authorities, lacking the pressure of an energetic régime demanding results, whatever the cost in orthodoxy, behaved in their pre-war fashion, and failed to cut
corners. The army lost 1,000 guns in the first six months of war—excluding those of Przemyśl—and had 278 replacements.
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