The Eastern Front 1914-1917 (39 page)

Conscription is often put forward as one of the chief factors causing Russia’s economic problems in the First World War. It is alleged to have caused fearsome problems both for agriculture and industry; and no doubt did bring about severe, local disruption. But it has to be put into perspective. Russia called up just over fourteen million men between 1914 and 1917, from a population of almost 180 millions. This was barely more than France, with a population of forty millions, and less than Germany, with one of sixty-five millions. As far back as 1902, the surplus rural population of Russia had been reckoned to be twenty-two millions,
so that Russia should have been more able than either western country to sustain real mass-conscription. In reality, the baneful effects of conscription were yet another hard-luck story, exempting government from its responsibilities. It was not so much an economic as an administrative problem, one calling in question the whole relationship of government and people. The government shrank from the creative effort that real conscription would have involved. Like most autocracies, its great strength was, not that it governed harshly, but that it governed less. Its tax-collectors and recruiting-sergeants were little more than a nuisance; and the government rightly feared that, if they became more, it would be swept away in a tide of popular indignation. Real conscription was possible only where a partnership existed between people and administration. A partnership of this kind existed in England, but not in Ireland; in Germany, but not in Austria; in the Red Army of 1918, but not in the Tsarist one of 1916. In 1918, there was a great rush of volunteers for the Red Army, and men who failed to report for it would be ‘informed’ on by their fellows. After 1914, there was a rush to benefit from the various statutes of exemption, and most of the Russian people seem to have sympathised. The Tsarist army thereby came to suffer from a shortage of man-power that no-one could honestly explain.

A large part of the difficulty was of course the authorities’ simple incomprehension of it. They had never supposed, before the War, that they would need to call on more than a fraction of Russia’s available manpower, since they foresaw neither the casualties nor the length of the war to come, and in any case could not imagine supplying more than a million or so men at the front. They had, indeed, been criticised by progressive critics not for producing too few soldiers, but for producing too many, who swamped the training-facilities. They called up less than five million men in 1914, and thought this would suffice, since both France and Germany called up much the same. The active army—i.e. the conscripts of the years 1911, 1912 and 1913—went off to war, with the trained reserve of the first class, i.e. men who had served in the ranks between 1904 and 1910, respectively, some 1,500,000 and 2,800,000.
^*
Numbers were made up with Cossacks and classes of territorial troops, called up to guard bridges and depots. Altogether, mobilisation in 1914 thus affected some 4,500,000 men.

Casualties in 1914–15 went far beyond what anyone had imagined possible, indeed far beyond what the authorities were capable of counting. The authorities became aware of constant demands for more men, and lurched about in a fog. The army’s statistical office was the
Glavny Shtab
, which was run, almost by definition, by incompetents, who had failed to make a career in anything other than this department, which was regarded as a waste-paper-basket. The few dozen dim-witted officers of this department attempted to keep up with losses by installing an enormous set of filing-cabinets, where they faithfully recorded every man’s career—his medals, promotions, permits, wounds. When casualties ran into hundreds of thousands per month, the
Glavny Shtab
succumbed, and could produce nothing beyond unenlightened guess-work. There is, as a result, much confusion as regards the army’s losses in the First World War—figures between four and eleven million being quoted. Most authorities, Soviet and émigré, inclined to the higher figure—no doubt to display that allied money had not gone in vain, and therefore need not be repaid—but a sober Soviet investigation results in a figure of between 7,000,000 and 7,500,000 for losses of all categories to the armistice of December 1917. Of these, three million were caused in 1916, and the bulk of the rest in 1914–15. With losses running at between 300,000 and 400,000 per month, of whom forty per cent would not be able to return to the front, the authorities were therefore faced with a situation in which each month of the war was eating up the recruit-contingent of a single pre-war year; and the situation was quite possibly more serious still, in so far as the casualty-returns did not include men who were cured at the front-hospitals and returned to their units within a short time.

The authorities were thus driven to make a much more profound effort of conscription than they had thought possible. They had certain obvious openings. The trained reserve of both classes represented fifteen recruit-contingents of the period 1896–1910 inclusive, and these were taken in. They should have amounted to five million men, but because, in the course, of their liability to reserve-service, many had become physically less able than before, or had acquired a right to exemption, or had simply disappeared without trace, no more than 3,100,000 men were taken in from this set during the war, of whom more than two-thirds were affected by the initial call-up of August 1914. A second obvious opening was for the army to anticipate the conscription of future recruit-contingents, i.e. to summon to the colours in 1914 or 1915 young men who would not normally have served until they reached the age of twenty-one in the years to come. The ‘recruit-contingents’ of 1914–18 were all called up in 1914–15, and were mustered in the usual way, i.e. exemptions and deferments carried on as before, so that each contingent counted 585,000
men, although three times as many Russians would reach the military age in that year. This gave the army a further three million men to use, who were put into the army during 1915 and 1916. Delays in the delivery of these new troops caused difficulties, even in 1915; but in any event they could not cover the demands of modern war. The army would have to conscript some more, from somewhere.

It would have to delve into the ranks, first of the older men (forty-one—forty-three years of age) who had completed their term of service with the reserve and who had gone into the first class of the territorials. This was duly done, though without much return in terms of numbers. A second step was to call up elements of this class of the territorials who had not served in the army at all, who had not been taken in for full-scale military service, although physically able for it, because they were ‘supernumerary’ to the army’s requirements in recruits in that year. Both sources gave, together, a further three million men. The next step would be to exploit the vast sea of the second class of the territorials: men who had been exempted altogether from military service, or who had dropped out, for one reason or another, from one of the other classes while liable for service. The territorial force was vast, since it accounted for more than two-thirds of the male subjects of the Tsar; but the second class, though presumably including, in every year, 400,000 men, gave only three million men for the army in the First World War. The army’s failure to exploit territorial troops properly is a considerable puzzle. Of course, some soldiers simply wrote off the untrained
opolchentsy
as quite useless in the field. But the real problem was failure of will. The authorities did not want to bring upon themselves the unpopularity that conscription of this kind could bring; more pertinently, it is doubtful if any kind of serious record existed of these millions of men, scattered all over Russia. The
Glavny Shtab
and the military districts had not imagined, before 1914, that such a record would be needed, and now, in wartime, was hardly the point where one could be set up. Even in countries more advanced, and easier to survey, than Russia, the military authorities made all kinds of blunders in conscription—serving call-up papers on cripples, dead men, lunatics, convicts. In Russia, the dimensions of this would make the State ridiculous as well as detestable. In fact, the territorial troops could be conscripted only if they reported for duty, which they might do for the Red Army, but not for the Tsarist one. It was only in places where records were reasonably good, and where the police could do their work, that territorials were conscripted in any numbers. In practice, this meant the big towns; and of course was followed by complaints from factory-owners working for defence that their skilled workmen were being removed, so that even attempts to conscript the territorial troops of whom the army had some
record would produce clouds of demands for exemption—two million, or two-fifths of the contingent that the big towns were expected to produce for the army. Had Russia been able to conscript in the French manner, she would have called up sixty million men; but she called up less than a quarter of this.

These confusions also affected the recruitment of officers. For most of the time, deferments by reason of education were maintained, and the universities of Russia continued at full blast, disturbed at best by ineffective appeals for volunteers. The war ministry grumbled that it needed officer-material. The other ministers asserted that it would be unfair to conscript senior students just as they were about to take their final examinations; and that it would be equally unfair to conscript their juniors while the seniors were being exempted. Neither set was therefore affected—partly because ministers resented the waste of talented men on the army, partly because they feared what the educated classes would do if the State leant on them, and it was not until the end of 1915 that any encroachments were made on the universities. The army of 1916 therefore had 80,000 officers, more than double those of the army of 1915.

The authorities were at a loss, and could only screw up their existing methods as far as possible. They extended liability for service to the age of fifty; they anticipated conscription, and took in seventeen-year-old boys—thus arriving at the situation, peculiar to Russia, of grandfathers and grandsons leaving for the front, being waved off by the middle, exempted, generation. They exerted increasing pressure, not on the men who had escaped their net before 1914, but on the youngest classes. In June 1915 they extended their recruiting for the classes 1915–18 to include all men who were physically fit, i.e. the standard recruit-contingent of 585,000 with a supernumerary element that would usually have gone to the territorials. In October 1915 they produced a law to allow revision of past exemptions (and then, characteristically, failed to operate it, since re-combing gave them less than 250,000 soldiers throughout the war); finally, in December 1915, they made a new military law that allowed a recruit-contingent of 985,000, applicable to the 1919 class. The Russian army was thus overwhelmingly made up of men aged from seventeen to twenty-five, but its commanders were not often less than sixty years of age. More important in the short run was that the army was coming to an end of the possible recruits. The army for 1916 included 4,587,145 men, and there was a reserve of 1,545,000. But behind it, there was only the anticipated recruit-contingent of 1919, and a further batch of territorials, together not 3,000,000 men. If the war did not end in 1916, the State would have to undertake some conscription of the huge classes of territorials of which there was little record.
⁵
Not surprisingly, Stavka was
pressed to win the war before the State had to make this effort. 1916 was the last chance.

It was an equal paradox of this war that men’s war-aims ran up parallel with the difficulties of attaining them. Theoretically, a State in the vulnerable situation of the Tsarist one should not have exposed itself any longer to war. But there seems to have been very little thought, in circles that mattered, of a separate peace with the Germans, and peace-feelers never went beyond surreptitious and insincere conversations, although the Germans kept trying for more. On the contrary, Russian aims went up, parallel with the sacrifices being demanded of the people; and ministers feared that the whole system would be overthrown if they did not offer satisfaction to the national aspirations. Sazonov and his associates wanted to set up a range of Russian satellite-states in eastern Europe—independent Bohemia, enlarged Serbia, semi-independent and enlarged Poland—and to assert Russian control of the Dardanelles. Much to their surprise, the British took the lead in offering Constantinople, in spring 1915, though themselves making off with the oil-rich areas of the Turkish empire. Somewhat later, as a result of provisions of the inter-allied economic conference, Russia was promised part of the reparations to be exacted from the Central Powers; and by the beginning of 1917 the French were prepared to underwrite a huge Russian empire from Stettin to Trieste and the Straits, in exchange for Russian guarantee of French supremacy in seventeenth-century style, over the Palatinate and the Saar.
⁶
Even many left-wing members of the Provisional Government secretly approved of these aims, and it was not until the November Revolution that they were seriously disavowed.

In the old days, governments under pressure could always make peace before the crisis bit too deep. Now, they had the physical power to carry on the war for a long time, with hundreds of thousands of recruits, the capacity to supply them, and boundless possibilities for joyous arithmetic in paper-money. Moreover, the First World War both coincided with, and caused, a social dislocation that did much to make war-aims a matter of life and death for important sections of each country, and as the war went on, the increase in social dislocation, far from producing demands for peace, instead produced still greater war-aims, almost independently of vicissitudes at the front. Already before 1914 the comfortable gold-standard world had been under strain, as the process of levelling between sections of the working-class and sections of the middle-class went ahead. This was shown, for instance, in the threefold rise of servants’ wages between 1870 and 1910; it was also shown in the decline, marked from the 1880s, of the middle-class birth-rate, as, particularly in France, middle-class families became prepared to forego children in order to maintain a
nanny. The First World War vastly increased these tensions. Wartime inflation—which reduced the value of the pound by almost two-thirds in four years, and the value of other currencies still more—knocked away the great prop of the rentier world, the fixed income. Taxation became more severe; and many middle-class occupations became, in wartime, almost redundant. The wages of actors in Austria, for instance, remained exactly the same throughout the war, although prices rose five or six times; the salary of high bank officials doubled, but the wages of a plumber’s assistant quadrupled.
⁷
Middle-class property was sold off, as the rents on it declined in value: there were considerable rises in peasant-held land in France, and in Italy agricultural ‘squatting’ came to an almost complete end during the war, as even small peasants became able to buy property. At the same time, government spending opened up a whole range of new employment-possibilities for the working-classes; and the decline of middle-class buying-power on the one side, and the opening of these new possibilities, on the other, resulted in a considerable drop, in most countries, of domestic servants. In England, there had been over a million domestic servants in 1914, but by 1920 there were not 400,000. It is not irrelevant to war-aims that half, a million middle-class women were having to do the washing-up for the first time in their lives.
^*