The Eastern Front 1914-1917 (33 page)

The Russian Council of Ministers
²¹
was rather less full of admiration for it. As the army retired, its leaders demanded extension to the east of the area of military administration. Polivanov himself, the war minister, remarked: ‘It was pretty bad in Germany and Poland; it would be national disaster to have it close to Tver and Tula.’ The minister of the interior, Prince Shcherbatov, thought that ‘the picture of military rear-areas is one of sickening outrages, anarchy, arbitrariness’—even children being imprisoned in Warsaw for ‘activities against the State’. The retreat itself was ‘a mad bacchanalia’—Cossacks dragging off refugee-women with their long whips; ‘while thousands of people trudge along the railway-lines they are passed by speeding trains loaded with couches from officers’ clubs, and carrying quarter-masters’ bird-cages’. General Danilov, the supply-chief of Alexeyev’s front, was said to have reserved a train for his mistress. A great flood of refugees—variously estimated at one million people—moved to the east, eventually to be dispersed, in miserable conditions, in the great Russian cities. A British observer noted how one officer, told to manage the movement of refugees over-a solitary bridge over the Bug, made each one pay a toll. The army leaders had proclaimed a new 1812. This was not historically accurate—in 1812, the Russian armies had been pushed back, had not really made a voluntary retreat at all, which was a Tolstoyan fabrication. But even the fabrication was not really imitated, now. A ‘scorched earth’ policy was proclaimed—all
movables to be moved, crops to be burned, and so on. In practice, this meant merely a heightened degree of anti-semitism. Land-owners could usually pay to have their crops survive, their movables not moved; some of the great Polish noble families—Potockis, Sapiehas—had links with all three high commands, and could thus ensure complete survival of their estates. The earth was therefore only selectively scorched, and ‘Even the most extreme anti-Semites have been moved to complain at treatment of the Jews’.
²²

But the retreat achieved at least some strategic point. The Germans were led into an infertile area, and their supply-problems became overwhelming as they arrived on the Pinsk-Baranovitchi-Slonim positions early in September. They had captured a large number of stragglers and deserters, but the Russian army had remained intact, while, apart from the guns taken in fortresses, and the 250 of Galicia west of the San, only a few tens of guns had been taken in the German advance: Gallwitz, for instance, twenty only in the course of a six-week campaign.

Only on the northern part of the front was there still a significant German threat. By mid-July, politicians and
Stavka
alike began to fear that Riga would soon fall. The Germans had taken Mitau, and their cavalry also began to sweep towards the approaches of Kovno. Defence was characteristically inept. The cavalry groups of Grabbe, Trubetskoy and Kaznakov manoeuvred with pretentiousness, to no purpose. The troops of V Army were unreliable, such that, with the withdrawal of the central armies, a new army command was set up to cover Riga (XII Army). Threats to Riga and to Kovno pulled the Russian commanders in two directions, leaving a gap increasingly exploited by the Germans; and the Russian commanders did not feel they had the strength for an offensive that could have reduced the danger. Alexeyev, meanwhile, refused to part with troops for this area. He had his hands full in central Poland, and could see no case for giving any greater superiority of numbers to the armies in Courland than they already had: ten and a half infantry and nine and a half cavalry divisions to the
Niemen-Armee’s
seven infantry and six and a half cavalry.

The Germans, too, increased their interest in Courland. Since mid-June, Ludendorff had wanted a full-scale offensive in the north: according to him, it would grip the Russian flank, would lead to collapse of the Russian position in central Poland, and possibly to an entrapping of huge Russian forces in the Polish salient. When, early in August, Falkenhayn decided merely to follow the Russian retreat, Ludendorff wrote that ‘To us it is obvious that Mackensen, Woyrsch (in the centre) and Gallwitz can probably force the Russians to retreat, but not to a decisive end’. Falkenhayn did not see things this way. The northern attack was out of
the question for ‘season and terrain’. Mobility was so low that no entrapping-operation of the type planned by Ludendorff offered any more than tactical success—as had indeed been the case with every one of the operations planned, and expensively executed, by Ludendorff since Tannenberg. The Germans would only be led into some wilderness or other. The exchanges became heated. Ludendorff said it was an elementary truth of warfare that flanks were to be preferred to centre. Falkenhayn retorted that ‘a rapid advance on the wings is only possible if there is strong pressure on the centre’. Falkenhayn was right, in this case. The reason for Ludendorff’s successes in Courland was that the great bulk of Russian troops was tied in the centre by Gallwitz and Mackensen. Moreover, Falkenhayn did not mean to go on into Russia. He thought it would stimulate Russian resistance, that it would give supply-problems. He also had other things to do—planning a campaign against Serbia, to open the route to Turkey. A Bulgarian Colonel had already been sent to Pless, and the terms of a military convention discussed. Already in early August Falkenhayn had said that eastern operations must be stopped ‘on the approximate line Brest-Litovsk—Grodno’. Ludendorff objected, as news of the plodding advance of Gallwitz came in; the diarist of his command recorded, ‘It all makes us scream with rage’. The Kaiser, Bethmann Hollweg and others were involved. Falkenhayn won the arguments, as, probably, he deserved to. He cut down Hindenburg’s power in the east, setting up a separate
Generalgouvernement
in Warsaw under Beseler, and the troops of the German centre as an independent Army Group—
Heeresgruppe Prinz Leopold
.

Ludendorff’s plan for a northern attack did not have much sense except in terms of a pinning of Russian reserves in the central theatre more or less as Falkenhayn perceived. With such pinning, the German
Niemen-Armee
did well in Courland, and X Army could advance towards Kovno. Alexeyev was transfixed by the problems of extricating his central armies—I, II, IV, XIII, III—at a time when all had been sharply reduced in numbers
²³
—in the case of I Army to 100,000, of XIII Army, to 63,000, of III Army, to 55,000, or less than half their complements, in III Army’s case one-third.
Stavka
was deeply worried that the Germans might land on the Baltic coast, even threaten Petrograd; inspection of the defences of the capital revealed that the way at Pskov was quite open to attack. The Duma and the government set up an outcry. Yet the western Powers, who had promised an offensive in France for much of the summer, remained passive. Appeals went off to Joffre in the name of the heroic Russian army, to which the French said ‘Amen’ and went on as before.
²⁴
The British, in particular, had a cornucopia of inter-Allied banalities into which they delved deeply when they were driving a hard bargain. Their
offensive did not take place until the end of September, even then to little strategic consequence. Yanushkevitch’s fears for the Baltic coast were now boundless. He interfered again and again with Alexeyev’s conduct of operations there, even wondering why commanders did not lead their men from the front line—a curious observation from a chief of staff who never once saw the front line. He told Alexeyev to send the Guard Corps—then counting 27,000 men—to stave off a quite imaginary threat to Pernau. Alexeyev, who needed the Guard to cover his retreat against Mackensen, temporised. A categorical order caused him to send it to Vilna and a division to Kovno, ‘with an extremely heavy heart, and only in view of the alleged indispensability of the transfer’.
²⁵
Stavka
now felt that the responsibilities were too great for Alexeyev alone; a new, northern, front must be set up. As befitted the national emergency, an orthodox relic was selected to command it—Ruzski. The division of fronts occurred on 17th August, and in this period Ruzski’s front rose to twenty-eight divisions, Alexeyev’s sixty-one, Ivanov’s twenty-five.

But before the northern front could be built up to such proportions, a German offensive was under way in the north. It occurred at a time of abnormal confusion on the Russian side, since Alexeyev had washed his hands of the northern front before Ruzski took it over. X Army and V Army were not co-operating—V drawn into the Courland battles, X into those on the Bobr, near Grodno. The fortress of Kovno co-operated with neither army. It was an object-lesson in the non-role of fortresses in the First World War. It contained a large number of guns—1,360, 350 of them heavy—and had received desultory fortification before 1914. It was too imposing to be abandoned, in the way Osowiec or Pultusk might be abandoned. But it had serious weaknesses—no barracks, other than those for gunners, no underground communications, and a basic belt of forts built for the conditions of 1880. Grigoriev, the commander, was aged nearly seventy, and had learned little of modern war except that Germans could not be defeated. He prevented initiatives by his subordinates—particularly the artillery commander—but took none himself, visiting one of the forts, at that only once. The defence lacked management—as Germans took one fort, guns of another would fire by mistake at a fort still maintained by Russians. Grigoriev seems to have given up hope because of the garrison he received—a second-line division and a mob of territorials, most of them arriving in Kovno only a week before the siege. On one of the forts, preparation for gunnery was such that only one battery had even a brick emplacement, the others being not camouflaged at all. In another area woods half a mile away had not been cleared. The German bombardment was effective, in circumstances
of this kind. The garrison panicked, and on 17th August Grigoriev himself fled, having to be chased, subsequently, by the gendarmerie—for which he was sentenced to fifteen years’ hard labour. The German X Army took, here, over 1,300 guns, 53,000 rounds of heavy shell, and over 800,000 of light shell.
²⁶

The fall of Kovno marked the end of the old
Stavka
. It is impossible to tell the course of events, here, since the Tsar did not reveal what was in his mind. But Polivanov appeared in
Stavka
by train, failed to call on Yanushkevitch, commandeered the
Stavka
Rolls and motored to consult Alexeyev. Shortly after, the Tsar sent word that Grand Duke Nicholas would henceforth be Viceroy of the Caucasus; and, to universal shock, the Tsar declared that he would take the supreme command himself. His motives for doing so can only be guessed at. He knew that Grand Duke Nicholas enjoyed much popularity in ‘enlightened’ Russia—the students of Petrograd University went on strike when he was dismissed
²⁷
—such that to get rid of the Grand Duke would need a very high card. The Grand Duke had engaged in political activity—had promoted the cause of capitalists in war-contracts, had supported the Duma liberals. In the summer political crisis, he had often been mentioned as a possible replacement for the Tsar. The Tsar would no doubt have removed him before; the fall of Kovno, and threats to Riga, provided an opportunity when
Stavka
’s prestige was running down. On 1st September, the Tsar himself took over the supreme command. His chief of staff was Alexeyev, who passed command of the new western front to Evert.
^*

In this period of confusion, the strained situation on the Niemen continued. The German, Morgen, showed much virtuosity, persuading Ruzski that there would soon be a German offensive towards Petrograd, with a naval landing on the Baltic coast, such that Ruzski bunched his new forces at Friedrichstadt and Dvinsk, leaving a fifty-mile gap between V and X Armies that could be covered only by cavalry. X Army had been shaken by the fall of Kovno, and had to execute a complicated manoeuvre from Grodno, protecting its northern flank and Vilna. Ludendorff could also profit from the delay in shifting north the Russian troops of the centre, for Alexeyev was still more worried that their front would collapse than that Ruzski’s front might be pierced. Many of these central divisions had lost heavily from German battering, from desertion and sickness. One—27. infantry division of 31. Corps, which was not even particularly hard-hit by the then standards, lost 8,848 men and 90 officers (5,385 wounded, 1,951 missing) between mid-June and mid-September, being reduced from 6,500 rifles on 30th July to 3,500 on 25th September,
and its Corps—nominally with four divisions—to 13,300 men with 354 officers,
²⁸
Alexeyev was still reluctant to divert such troops to the north, an area he regarded as already substantially-covered.

This left an area that Ludendorff could still exploit. Early in September he put into effect the great northern offensive with which he had entertained Falkenhayn since July. He did so against Falkenhayn’s will. Falkenhayn had already warned the eastern commanders in August that they would have to stop, and he repeated the instruction on 2nd September. Ludendorff ‘misunderstood’ the instruction, and Conrad, also anxious to invade Russian territory, did so as well. Even the central commanders—Linsingen, Woyrsch, Prince Leopold—on whom Falkenhayn could normally rely, blundered forward into the Pripyat marshes, although, with a Balkan offensive being prepared, they could not count on much support. The preconditions for success were dwindling.
²⁹
In July and August, Ludendorff had done well in the north largely because of continual pressure on the Russian centre. The pressure now slackened—partly because of the terrain, partly because the quality of German troops was running down, partly because the line had been so shortened—from 1,700 kilometres to 1,000—that Russian reserves could now be freed for the northern sector. Moreover, the Russian output of shell was increasing: 100,000 rounds per week in July, 220,000 in September, while reserve-troops began to come in greater numbers. X Army around Vilna had 105,000 men, most of them with rifles, and 600 guns, with up to 200 shells to use.