The Eastern Front 1914-1917 (32 page)

Both places had fallen by the end of the month, after a break-through at Krasnostaw that brought 15,000 prisoners in a day. Conrad again grumbled that more force should be sent towards the north-east, and an attempt made to trap huge Russian forces in the Polish pocket. But Falkenhayn had no time for schemes of this kind. In the days when cavalry was effective, they were all very well: now, they would simply mean infantry plodding forward through difficult country against an enemy going away by railway. It was much better to draw the enemy into a battle somewhere where he would not refuse to fight, and then knock him down by virtue of artillery-superiority. In irritation, he told Conrad—in words that have subsequently been held up as an instance of strategic bankruptcy—‘It is endlessly less important where Mackensen and the
Bug-Armee
break through, than that they should merely break through somewhere.’ Falkenhayn was a modern general, and had a more sensible view of the war than either Ludendorff or Conrad. He knew that great manoeuvres, as in past wars, could not fit in with present circumstances. The war in the East proved Falkenhayn to be right. What shook
Stavka
was not the ostensibly brilliant manoeuvring of Ludendorff—and certainly not that of Conrad—but the huge losses they suffered in set-piece soldiers’ battles such as Gorlice, or Mackensen’s bludgeoning before Lublin. They were much more costly, even than Tannenberg. Alexeyev told the Grand Duke late in July—when
Stavka
protested that the new army appeared to be achieving little—‘You appear not to appreciate the situation regarding III and XIII Armies (on Mackensen’s front). In numbers, they are now insignificant, exhausted in an extreme degree, incapable of further resistance.’ 10. Corps counted only 4,000 men ‘with almost no officers left’; and so few troops could come in ‘that it is all just a drop in the ocean’. The two armies together required 180,000 men to bring them up to their complement. In a world in which Napoleonic envelopment was ruled out, Mackensen’s tactics offered easily the best method of knocking Russia out of the war. It was Conrad and Ludendorff that were out of date.

Mackensen’s advance from Galicia was very slow, dependent on constant assembly of ammunition and reserve-troops. Until mid-July, the railway functioned only as far as Rozwadów on the San,
¹⁵
and even thereafter only to Lwów; everything had to be brought up by cart, and even when a field-railway was constructed—rails along which horses
might pull small waggons—it only went as far as Lublin, in mid-August. The attrition-battle was in itself something of an achievement, and there was certainly no room for ambitious schemes in the Pripyat.

Mackensen’s attack made sense only if there were a complementary attack over the Narev. The Germans had decided on this early in July, for a break-through here would cause the collapse of the Russian position in Poland; and Falkenhayn calculated that the Russians would make some effort to defend Warsaw and their fortresses. The Narev offered conditions for a successful battle of attrition, the more so as Russian reserves would necessarily be confused between the Kovno front, the Narev, and Mackensen’s front. These calculations—despite what Ludendorff subsequently said—were correct.

The Germans put, on forty kilometres, ten and a half divisions, one in reserve, over 1,000 guns and, for the east, ‘masses’ of shell—400,000 rounds.
¹⁶
They had tried to break through in the area west of the Narev in February-March, and had failed; now they were determined to risk nothing. The operation was prepared with characteristic thoroughness, the artillery being in charge of Bruchmüller, the break-through expert. The offensive was to begin on 13th July. Success was based on much the same factors, though on a lesser scale, as at Gorlice in May.
Stavka
and Alexeyev had confused their reserves, partly because they were already undecided as to whether further retreat should be undertaken, partly because they were in no agreement as to priorities. Alexeyev had arranged for reserves to come to the Narev from the central theatre, but he had left it too late. When the Germans attacked, these were still many miles from the front. Tactically, the Russian position was also weaker than it should have been. The German attack fell on the inner wings of two armies—XII (Churin) and I (Litvinov). They did not co-operate efficiently. They had lost 2. Siberian Corps and the Guard for the south-western front. Yet they were deluded by their success in February. There was no inspection of the front line until a week before the Germans attacked, when a commission of 1. Siberian Corps reported that gun-positions were too open, dug-outs were constructed with weak, even rotten, timber, the trench-lines had not been planned with defence in mind, and in the second position the vegetation had not been cleared. Seven divisions with 377 guns held this line, and are said to have had only forty rounds per gun to use; although—as at almost every turn in the Russian material crisis—a great deal of the material shortage could have been compensated for by more agile behaviour on the ground. In this case, the Russians had on their flank the 1,600 guns of Novogeorgievsk, of which no use at all was made.

Litvinov and Churin also mismanaged the battle. As ought to have
been foreseen, the bombardment was successfully managed. A Siberian division tried to escape from it in the middle, and lost fifty per cent in half an hour. On 13th July, the two Russian armies were forced two miles apart—the break-through, near Przasnysz. Reserves did not co-operate. Counter-attacks would be launched by the one, while pure defence was maintained by the other. Litvinov demanded ‘categorically that all troops should hold their lines’—merely a way of making sure they would be ground down by the German guns. The two central divisions were almost wiped out. Alexeyev had arranged for two corps to come to the Narev (21. and 3. Siberian), but they were too far off to help. Such reserves as did come in were mishandled—taken by one corps commander, then another.
¹⁷
By 17th July, the Germans had advanced perhaps five miles, but they had inflicted seventy per cent losses on the defenders (including 24,000 prisoners, a quarter of the Russian numbers). This coincided with Mackensen’s successes at Kraśnik and Krasnostaw. Alexeyev pulled back his troops to the Narev, with corresponding withdrawals to left and right.

Maybe the Narev line could have been held, if defensive tactics had been correct. But Litvinov himself could not imagine any other system of defence than that which he had applied—every soldier to stay put until wiped out, after which reserves would arrive to be wiped out—and told Alexeyev that ‘My army will be unable to hold out for long on this new line, as it is not fortified and its right flank is altogether unsuitable for defence.’ The fortresses of Pultusk and Rozan were museums—though costly enough, before the war—and the river was not deep. On 17th July, both Falkenhayn and Gallwitz—commanding the offensive—felt that they could manage to break through grandly towards Warsaw. But Alexeyev had planned things well enough. As the Germans came forward, they stumbled against increasing numbers of Russian troops, such that the 62 battalions and 188 guns that had faced the initial German attack rose to 100 and 600 respectively once the Germans arrived on the Narev. German attacks fared badly—the guns unprepared for Russian resistance, the troops defeated by machine-gunnery; and, other than an unexpected tactical success near Rozan, there were no gains to report, and only 3,000 prisoners.

It was not the defence that snapped, but
Stavka
’s nerve. Alexeyev had so far fought the battle correctly enough, and Gallwitz would have had great trouble in penetrating the Narev. But there were complications on other fronts—the north-east, where a very original set of blunders led the Germans towards Kovno—and even in the central theatre where, just west of the Vistula, the German IX Army was allowed to win a success with almost no superiority of numbers at all. On the southern side, the
railway from Lublin to the east was cut by Mackensen, and for a time even the activity of an Austro-German cavalry force east of the Bug (Heydebreck) was taken seriously. On 19th July Yanushkevitch opined that the German break-through to the Narev meant giving up Warsaw; the Grand Duke himself turned up in Alexeyev’s headquarters and said that retreat to the Vistula, in the centre, was now required—otherwise significant forces would be cut off in Poland; and Alexeyev was now told ‘You can evacuate Warsaw, if you feel you must’. On 22nd July orders went out for a retreat of the Narev groups to the east (Lomza—Siedlce—Kock) and of the southern armies to a line north of Lublin and Cholm (Ivangorod—Opalin—Kowel). Apart from a minor mishap on the Vistula, this retreat was undertaken. The Germans entered Warsaw on 4th August.
¹⁸

The Russian retreat had been conducted in reasonably good order. The river-system of the northern side held the Germans, and the fortress of Osowiec continued to defy German attempts (even with gas, on 6th August) such that no break-through into the rear of the central Russian armies could be made. The only serious misfortune of the retreat from the Vistula was the fate of Novogeorgievsk. In June, when ideas of retreat were beginning to tell, some consideration had been given to it. Alexeyev, in his heart, knew that fortresses were a trap: if they were at all suitably fortified, they merely reproduced, in a defence-version, the disadvantages normally suffered, in this war, by the attacker—obviousness of target, vulnerability of troops—as well as more traditional supply-problems. But Alexeyev was always easily-swayed by men of higher class than himself. Novogeorgievsk was the symbol of Russian rule in Poland; ‘spiritual motives speak for its defence’. The railways did so also. Evacuation had been left too late, for the trains needed to evacuate Warsaw—government services, army goods, much of the industrial machinery—were under way and there was not much to spare for Novogeorgievsk, or so officers made out.
Stavka
seemed to think that Novogeorgievsk would be a Przemyśl, not an Antwerp; it should hold for six months. But Przemyśl had really been defended by mud—heavy guns could not be manoeuvred properly—whereas Novogeorgievsk had no such advantage. Its citadel could be fired on by modern artillery, since the forts supposed to protect it had been built only to keep the older type of artillery out of range of the citadel. A new belt of forts had been begun in concrete, continued in brick, and left unfinished. Alexeyev could not spare proper troops for its defence, and sent only ‘the piteous remnant’ of 11. Siberian division, and a second-line division, 63rd, that appears to have had the worst record of any division in the army. 58th, another second-line force with a long and calamitous history, was moved in at
the last moment. 1,600 guns and nearly a million shells were none the less kept in the place. As the Germans advanced, they enclosed it early in August. Beseler, conqueror of Antwerp, arrived with a siege-train. On the first day, he captured the chief engineer of Novogeorgievsk, doing the rounds, with a map of the defences on his person. The German artillery overpowered the defenders; one fort was blown up by a single shell. Bobyr surrendered on 19th August.
Stavka
learnt the news when the last of the fortress’s pilots landed—having been fired on by Russian guns—at Baranovitchi. Alexeyev prayed for an hour and a half.
¹⁹

From the beginning of August, a great Russian retreat went on, which lasted until the end of September. The line shortened as armies moved east from the Vistula: by 7th August the salient had been much flattened, by the 22nd the front ran almost perpendicularly from Osowiec—which acted as ‘hinge’ of the retreat—to Brest-Litovsk; by 30th August a further retiral had been completed, to east of Bialystok and Brest-Litovsk; and the retreat went on until the Germans had reached Lida, Baranovitchi, Pinsk, some way into White Russia. Whether this retreat was militarily essential is questionable. Suitable tactics probably would have held the Germans further west. But the generals had swallowed their own propaganda regarding material shortages, and felt they could not afford to fight. They had no faith in their men. They regarded the Germans as invincible. They were probably anxious, too, to ‘bring sense’ to the Russian government and the masses. Finally, they were anxious that reserve-troops should be created, by a shortening of the front, for Courland.

In theory, as the Russian armies retreated, German and Austrian groups to north and south should have broken through, into their rear, and trapped them. Mackensen and Gallwitz, with thirty-three and a half and twenty divisions respectively, were seemingly well-enough placed to achieve this. Falkenhayn himself wanted it—pressure on the centre should stop the Russians from retreating, while the two wings came forward. But on the ground this was not possible. Every day the Russians would retire three miles or so, construct a new line, and wait for the Germans to stumble up towards it; then a new phase of the retreat would begin. As the retreat went on, the line shortened with abandonment of the Polish salient, so that there were too many German divisions for the front—Gallwitz, for instance, advancing towards Bialystok, could put only five of his divisions in line at one time. In time, the Germans came up to primaeval forest—the Bialowieś woods—and the great marshes of the Pripyat. The railway-lines stopped on the Vistula; even field-railways came only to Ostroleka on the Narev, and supplies had to be dragged forward for the next forty or fifty miles. By 20th August, Gallwitz had
lost 60,000 men, well-over one third of his troops; and if the temporarily
hors de combat
are included, over half. His corps commanders were pessimistic. Watter said that his guns were worn-out, his horses exhausted, and the hay of low quality—yet by 20th August he was 125 kilometres from the railheads. Surén produced much the same story: ‘Progress takes ages… it is not so much the enemy’s strength as the complete impossibility of all observation in terrain of this type’. Even water—in this marshy region—was often difficult to come by, since everything had to be boiled. Conrad’s forces further south encountered similar problems, and Austrian attacks in East Galicia failed to dislodge the Russians from this part of the province. Tarnopol was still in Russian hands. At most, Russian rear-guards would be pierced, and some prisoners made. The Russian retreat went on just the same, the Germans being lucky to find some broken-down cart. Brest-Litovsk, with the example of Novogeorgievsk and, in the outcome, Kovno, before it, was not retained, although its evacuation was done at the last minute. Mackensen took it on 26th August, the Austrians, Kowel on the 21st and Gallwitz, Osowiec
²⁰
on the 26th. But these places were taken as the Russians retired. There was not much strategic advantage to the capture. The Germans were full of admiration for the ‘brilliant conduct’ of the Russian retreat.