The Eastern Front 1914-1917 (42 page)

Pleshkov had supposed that a narrow concentration of guns—on two kilometres of his twenty-kilometre sector—would create a break-through. His guns fired off their 200 rounds per day, commanders feeling that a weight like this—after all, equivalent to three months’ use of shell, as foreseen in 1914—could not go wrong. With four army corps on a front of twenty kilometres, against a German infantry division with one cavalry division, there ought not, in commanders’ view, to be any difficulty. By sending in waves of infantry on two kilometres, Pleshkov merely gave the German artillery a magnificent target; and when, as happened, these occupied German trenches, they would be fired on from three sides by German guns on the sides of the salient—guns that had been registered previously on the trenches, which were found evacuated. One division attacked before the other, because of an error in telephone-messages; it even attacked, on 18th March, under its own bombardment, no doubt because liaison between Zakutovski and Masalski was so poor. A further corps assaulted the woods of Postawy, also in vain—German guns being concealed by the woods. In all, Pleshkov’s group lost 15,000 men in the first eight hours of this offensive—three-quarters of the infantry mustered for attack, although fifteen per cent of Pleshkov’s total force. On 19th March the attacks were continued, although trenches now filled with water as rain came, with a thaw. There were minor tactical successes—600 prisoners being taken—and losses of 5,000 in a few hours, equivalent to a whole brigade. On 21st March Pleshkov tried again, and even Kuropatkin stumbled forward. Each lost 10,000. In the rear, confusion—brought about mainly by the presence of 233 cavalry squadrons, who monopolised supplies and transport—was of crisis proportions, the hospital-trains breaking down, troops going hungry while meat rotted in depots. Over half of all orders were counter-manded.

The only success of any dimensions came on Baluyev’s front, on Lake Narotch, where artillery and infantry had co-operated. At dawn on 21st March Baluyev attacked along the shores of Lake Narotch, using the ice, and helped by thick fog. His gunners sustained an artillery duel with the Germans, and a few square miles were taken, with some thousand prisoners. Sirelius, to the north, would not help at all, relapsing into cabbalistic utterance, and losing only one per cent of his force—through frost-bite. In the next few days, there were repeated attempts by Baluyev and Pleshkov; then the affair settled down to an artillery-duel. Later on, in April, the Germans took what they had lost. In all, they had had to move three divisions to face this attack, ostensibly, of 350,000 Russians. Not one
of these came from the western front. The Russian army lost 100,000 men in this engagement—as well as 12,000 men who died of frostbite. The Germans claimed to have lifted 5,000 corpses from their wire. They themselves lost 20,000 men.

Lake Narotch was, despite appearances, one of the decisive battles of the First World War. It condemned most of the Russian army to passivity. Generals supposed that, if 350,000 men and a thousand guns, with ‘mountains’ of shell to use, had failed, then the task was impossible—unless there were extraordinary quantities of shell. Alexeyev himself made this point to Zhilinski, saying that the French Army itself demanded 4,200 rounds per light gun, and 600 per heavy gun,
²²
before they would consider an offensive, and Russia had not these quantities. In practice, even Russia could have assembled such quantities on a given area of front had the generals managed their reserves properly. But they had no way of arranging sacrifices by one part of the front to the benefit of another; they did not understand the tactical problems; and, certainly, recognition of the extreme incompetence with which affairs had been combined in March, 1916 remained platonic. As before, artillery and infantry blamed each other, the only positive consequence being a demand for yet more shell. The way was open to
Upart’s
demand for 4,500,000 rounds per month, and also to the eighteen million shells that were stock-piled, to no effect save, in the end, to enable the Bolsheviks to fight the Civil War. Now the western and northern army groups would have no stomach for attack. It was only the emergence of a general whose common-sense amounted to brilliance, and who selected a group of staff-officers who were almost a kernel of the Red Army, that gave the Russian army a great rôle in 1916.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
Summer, 1916

Lake Narotch paralysed much of the Russian army for the rest of the war. Both Evert and Kuropatkin now disbelieved in the possibility of breaking through at all—indeed, Kuropatkin resigned in despair, to go and practise against Central Asian rebels the military talents that had been of so little service against Germans. Evert stayed at his post, though disbelieving in his troops, his guns, his positions. Both of the fronts against Germany were now beset by crippling feelings of inferiority. If nearly 300,000 Russians had failed to defeat 50,000 Germans—figures that Alexeyev gave to Zhilinski—then the cause was lost in advance. Yet by now there was a superiority, on these two fronts, of almost 800,000 men. No-one had any idea as to how this might be used. Inevitably, the generals fell back on their standard excuse for failure—shell-shortage. Alexeyev told Zhilinski early in April that ‘the latest details I have concerning shell-output, particularly for the heavier calibres, compose a quite hopeless picture, since our own production would not suffice even for a three-week operation’. The army would just have to sit back until enough heavy shell were produced to make an utter wreckage of even the best German positions. This was a dangerous illusion. Shell, even in the mountains assembled on the western front in 1916—the French used 10,500,000 rounds in some eighty-four days in the Verdun fighting—did not have decisive effect at all. But as news came into
Stavka
of the vast quantities assembled by the British and French for their summer offensive, Russian commanders grew ever more depressed. They could not compete with these mountains of shell; better therefore to do nothing. Then the British might send some more supplies.

But younger officers of the Russian army did have some notion that this pessimism was unnecessary. On the two fronts north of the Pripyat, they did not make much showing. But on the south-western front, their voices were heard. The south-western command did not altogether share the view that shell-shortage had caused defeat on the Strypa and on the Bessarabian border in December 1915. A report issued by Klembovski,
chief of staff to this command, announced that ‘It must be said that our constant complaints, to the effect that failure was brought about only by shortage of mortar and heavy shell, are far from being invariably correct’.
¹
In one case, twelve shells had been used per square yard of front, and 700 rounds per gun in a day. Shelling had even been counter-productive—ploughing into a morass the ground that infantry had to cross; and in any case they had had too much ground to cross, since the attackers had often started from a mile away, with predictable effects. Preparation of the attack was much more important than the simple strewing of shell. In the early months of 1916, these officers began to get control of the south-western front. In the first place, Ivanov was removed from command in April, his place taken by Brusilov. It is notable that officers of this front, in particular, formed a strong kernel of the Red Army in 1918–19. Brusilov, who had begun life as a scion of south-Russian gentry, married a cousin of Stolypin’s and Izvolski’s, and studied in the Tsar’s corps of pages, ended up as inspector-general of Trotski’s cavalry. Klembovski, corps commander in 1914, Velichko, engineering-chief of the front Karbyshev, chief engineer of VIII Army, Kirey, senior artillerist of IX, and a large number of the divisional commanders and chiefs of staff all took prominent places in the Red Army, a mark of the Bolsheviks’ considerable ability to attract all that was best in the Tsarist army, elements, that in
Stavka
’s day, were sacrificed to the attitudinisers and the senile.

A new Russian army was coming into existence, one where modest and sensible technicians were coming to power, men who could use the immensely promising natural qualities of the Russian soldier. Yet its emergence in 1916 broke a Tsarist pattern of much durability, and the dismissal of Ivanov, and his replacement by Brusilov, is a remarkable enough occurrence in the circumstances. Ivanov was a powerful figure in the army—associated with Sukhomlinov, yet careful to keep his links with the Grand Ducal side; in Lemke’s phrase, ‘a diplomat pretending to be a peasant’.
²
But he, too, was something of a ‘great poster’—supposed to be very popular with his men, no doubt kept on for that reason. Alexeyev had no faith in him; and after the Strypa failure, his position weakened very greatly. He fought to retain his command—decorating the little Tsarevich for inspecting the wounded, dismissing a succession of chiefs of staff. The Tsar was persuaded to release him in spring 1916, and Brusilov arrived in Berdichev to take over the front—Ivanov sobbing throughout dinner. He went to
Stavka
—‘Ivanov has become a complete old granny and needs doping’—and sat ostentatiously in his motor-car as conferences went on, until in the end the Tsar appointed him ‘adviser’, and included him in the
Stavka
deliberations. In March 1917, because of
his alleged popularity with the masses, he was entrusted with pacification of Petrograd—not a successful venture.

The removal of Ivanov was a sign that, as far as questions of command went, a new type of officer was emerging. In the south-western command, sense and modesty prevailed. Brusilov himself is something of a surprise in this context. He had been a very successful commander since 1914, taking VIII Army and at times being responsible for the whole of the Carpathian front. Before 1914, he had clearly been intelligent and agile in exploiting the promotions-system to arrive at high command without falling foul either of the cavalry-General Staff clique or of the war ministry clique: of course his social origins helped. He shared with Count Ignatiev—military attaché in Paris, Guards officer, and then Red major-general—an ability to cut free of class-considerations, and to identify in good time which side would be the stronger; he had a gift of choosing able subordinates, and to enforce their will on recalcitrant conservatives. Himself unmistakably, and in the end fatally, part of the world of 1914, he none the less had enough of the new Russia to him for its elements to break through in the front under Brusilov’s command. A new style came at once to the headquarters in Berdichev. Headquarters was a small building with a mere two sentries at the door. Right away, a new style came to front orders—crisp, organised prose in place of Evert’s meandering literature.
³

On 14th April Alexeyev summoned a meeting of the front staffs in Mogiliev. The French and British had demanded some Russian help in the summer, and this meeting was to discuss what form such help should take. Ostensibly, it should be considerable—there were now 1,700,000 men with rifles, and soon, with the arrival of the new conscript classes, the overall superiority would rise to 745,000, on the front north of the Pripyat, and 132,000 south of the Pripyat. Alexeyev himself said, ‘We are capable of decisive attack only on the front north of the Pripyat’,
⁴
and put forward a plan not unlike that of March—double offensive from the Dvina and the front of II and X Armies. Neither Evert nor Kuropatkin agreed. Kuropatkin said, ‘It is quite improbable that we could break through the German front, the lines of which have been strongly fortified and so developed that success is hardly imaginable’. Evert remarked, ‘Without superiority in heavy artillery, there is no chance of success’. In the end, Evert was pushed into agreement. He would take a very small area, send in two waves, each of three corps, assemble almost all of the thousand heavy guns behind his front, and take two months over preparations. The front of attack would be no greater than twenty kilometres. Even so, he was not happy.

The gathering was heartened by Brusilov. He said he would attack in
the summer, that he would need only trivial reinforcements in men and guns. Kuropatkin ‘looked at me and shrugged his shoulders, in pity’. Brusilov was told to go ahead, although, since he had not much superiority of any kind—except leadership—over the Austrians, no-one expected from his offensive much more than a tactical success, and quite possibly only a repetition of the Strypa failures. Yet Brusilov’s team had come up with new ideas that made for the most brilliant victory of the war. They had studied the failures of December and January, which—as Zayonchkovski says—served something of the same purpose as the Russo-Japanese war had done. In reality, the Russo-Japanese war had led men often enough merely to a more vigorous repetition of the same views as before, whereas Brusilov’s command seems to have thought things out radically. Whatever the reason, these men came onto methods that were used—without acknowledgment—by Ludendorff in 1918, and then by Foch. To some degree, these new methods were forced on Brusilov by his very weakness. He could not hope for a crushing superiority of shell, and so had to think things out in other terms; in a sense, he had an advantage of backwardness, of being forced to move from 1915 to 1918 without passing through the stage of sacrificial
Materialschlachten
between them.

The military problems of the First World War consisted of a number of circles to be squared. A successful offensive needed both surprise and preparation. These were incompatible: preparation of millions of men and horses took so long that surprise was impossible. In the same way, mobility and weight could not be reconciled. A huge weight of guns could be assembled. The enemy might be defeated. Then the guns could not be moved forward. In other words, armies would be mobile only if they had not the weight to make their mobility worthwhile. Brusilov’s staff noted that, in a break-through operation, there were too main problems—the break-through itself, and the exploitation of it. These demanded almost contradictory solutions. A break-through could only, it seemed, be achieved by assembly of great weight—enough shell to knock down thick belts of barbed-wire, destroy concrete enfilading-posts, dominate the enemy guns, destroy the defenders. But assembling this weight of guns and shell—and of course hundreds of thousands of men—would mean that the enemy knew what to expect, and when: just before Lake Narotch, for instance, German pilots had had no difficulty in spotting the long columns of Russian infantry marching through the snow towards the west. The defence would know where to put reserve-troops. Consequently, even if the break-through were achieved, the attackers would stumble onto a new line, not reconnoitred, with their own lines of supply complicated, crossing shell-torn ground known to the
enemy, while the attackers’ artillery would be too far behind. Counter-attacks would follow; enemy artillery to right and left would enfilade the attackers in the area of break-through and the attack would collapse, despite its initial tactical success. This had happened on the Strypa in December.