The Eastern Front 1914-1917 (51 page)

On the other hand, on the southern front the Central Powers’ offensive achieved considerable results. An offensive into the Dobrogea was prepared, and launched, mainly with Bulgarian and Arab divisions, on 21st October. Zayonchkovski’s army had not been strengthened: on the contrary, his demands for help had met only sarcastic remarks. He complained that his force was ‘only the bone thrown to the Romanians to get them into this war’; he went on at length about the ‘repulsive impression as regards military matters’ that he had gained of his allies, and about their ‘utter misunderstanding of modern war, their appalling inclination to panic’. But
Stavka
merely answered that, since the Romanians were not in any position of numerical inferiority, there should be no complaints. Defence of the Dobrogea was another piece of burlesque. Bombardment struck Romanians on the right, who retired without informing Russians
in the centre. The Russian centre fell back in confusion, and the race to retreat was then won by the Romanian left, which fled back along the Black Sea coast, pursued by Bulgarian cavalry over the sands. In no time, the railway-line between Cernavoda and Constanta, the Romanians’ main port, was broken. Constanta itself was not defended. Russians had ordered it to be destroyed, but the Romanians regarded it with too great pride to let this happen, and no doubt felt that their allies would make a thorough job of the destruction, if allowed to do so. They therefore surrendered the port, intact and with huge stocks of grain and oil, before the Russians could knock it about. The Russians naval detachment supposedly guarding it then sailed away, leaving the Romanian defenders to their fate.
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By the end of October, the Central Powers had captured more or less the whole of the Dobrogea, and threatened to cut off Bucharest from the sea.

Alexeyev now began to recognise that he would have to do something. The Kowel offensives had failed, and attacks in eastern Galicia were also dying down in failure; now the Central Powers had almost reached the Danube delta, and seemed to threaten southern Russia. Stavka first sent VIII Army to the Dniester, and then agreed to send another army, under Sakharov, to constitute, ‘Army of the Danube’ with a view to the defence of the delta and Gǎlǎti. Finally, IV Army was ear-marked for Romania. Throughout November, a great movement of Russian troops was under way—thirty-six infantry and eleven cavalry divisions.
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But the railway-lines, through Reni and Benderi, could take only 200 waggons a day, at a time when supply alone needed 433.
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The management of these lines was such that a French railway-expert suffered a nervous break-down when he was detailed to sort them out. It was not until mid-December that the Russian troops had arrived in full strength, and even then they were badly under-supplied. Early in November, what arrived could suffice only to prevent further Bulgarian progress along the Black Sea coast.

But this stability could not change things in Wallachia. The Russian troops could not reach Bucharest in time, nor indeed did Alexeyev particularly want them to, for he was concerned only to defend Moldavia and the approaches to southern Russia. A cavalry corps was sent, but it was exhausted in covering 400 miles, and even re-shoeing of the horses could take up to a week in Romanian conditions. Early in November, German troops penetrated the passes into the western part of Wallachia—Oltenia—and by mid-November had reached the plains. A cavalry corps moved east towards Bucharest, dislodging the defenders from the southern parts of other passes. On 23rd November the Germano-Bulgarian force crossed the Danube, and found the task easy enough, since the Romanians had now diverted most of their forces back to the Carpathian front: there
were only eighteen battalions to forty, and forty-eight guns to 188 when the Germans crossed at Ruščuk. By 29th November the two armies of the Central Powers were threatening Bucharest.

There was a final episode of drama. The Romanians had now been sent a French military mission, under Berthelot, Joffre’s chief of staff during the battle of the Marne.
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Berthelot was full of fight; he wished to build up the Romanian army—so much so that
Stavka
found his talk dangerous, and requested his removal. He had visions of a Balkan Marne: a flank-attack on the Germans as they approached Bucharest, crossing the Arges river. In the first days of December, Berthelot built up a
masse de manoeuvre
: divisions scraped from the Danube and the Carpathians. Amid grandiose announcements of national heroism, illiterate peasantry were driven forward by stage-heroic staffs into an affair that only consumed what was left of the reserve-divisions. Apart from a minor embarrassment, the Germans barely noticed ‘the Romanian Marne’. Socec, who led one of the Romanian divisions, led his men in flight, was subjected to preliminary investigation for court-martial, and was then absolved when the dossier of his case was ‘stolen’ from the war ministry archives. As a background to all this, British military representatives prudently toured the oil-areas of Ploiesti, setting light to the wells. In clouds of smoke, the remnants of the Romanian divisions withdrew to the north, leaving Bucharest to Mackensen who entered it on 7th December. Of the twenty-three Romanian divisions, six had ‘disintegrated’, two had been ‘captured’, and the rest contained, together, 70,000 men. Mackensen plodded after them. But with the arrival of Russian troops, the Germans’ progress was slow. They were held up at Urziceni, and then, in a battle over Christmas, at Rîmnicu-Sǎrat. By early January, they were lodged on the Siret, border of Moldavia, and could not progress beyond bridgeheads.

Thereafter, the Romanian campaign died down. Both sides suffered from difficulties of supply that prevented them from undertaking further action. On the Central Powers’ side, the cold caused casualties of twenty-five per cent. Mud, lice, appalling roads, lack of railways, hovels made up the picture. The Central Powers also quarrelled bitterly over spoils: Bulgarians and Turks wrangled over the future of the Dobrogea, many Germans and Austro-Hungarians wished to restore Romania as an ally of the Central Powers. At the same time, Mackensen was told to send troops to other fronts. On the Russo-Romanian side, there was also little appetite for action. The Romanian army had been put to flight; it could count on a man-power reserve of less than 250,000 men, most of them quite untrained. The Russians, who now dominated the area completely, had no stomach for further offensive action. Their only action of any scale between early January and the Kerenski offensive of mid-summer was a stroke on the
Baltic coast. Early in January they profited from withdrawal of German troops to stage a coup in Courland, against Mitau and Tukkum. They attacked by surprise, in an area of sand-dunes that masked the attackers’ activity; did not bombard in advance; did not attack in ‘waves’. In return for a few thousand casualties, they won a respectable success: thirty-six German guns and 8,000 prisoners. It was a symbol of the patterns prevailing on the eastern front. Minor attacks, launched by surprise, generally achieved far more impressive results than major ones preceded by heavy bombardment. The campaign of 1916 thus ended, fittingly enough, with a demonstration of Brusilov’s correctness.
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CHAPTER THIRTEEN
War and Revolution, 1917

Early in 1917, Russian generals were full of fight. Conferences with allied soldiers at Chantilly, and with allied politicians in Petrograd, confirmed suspicions that the Entente had now become vastly more powerful than the Germans: the western, eastern, Balkan and Italian fronts each showed an allied superiority of at least sixty per cent in men and guns. Even Evert’s mouth watered, as he contemplated the great amounts of shell with which he would plaster a few square kilometres of German line in the coming spring offensives. Moreover, the prospect of American intervention against Germany gave Russians and western Powers alike a hope of final success in 1917. None the less, there was to be little fighting in the east in 1917. Revolution broke out in March; there was a Bolshevik coup in November; Russia dropped out of the war in December, when an armistice was concluded at Brest-Litovsk; and a peace-treaty was signed in March 1918. In the meantime, the front itself was almost wholly inactive. There was some grumbling in March 1917, in Volhynia; an offensive, lasting a few days, in July; a German counter-offensive, which took Eastern Galicia in August, and Riga in September. The Russian economy might, now, be capable of sustaining a world war; but Russian society had not stood the strain. The home front collapsed into class-war; the army at the front could not apparently be got to fight; while the army in the rear joined the forces of revolution. Virtually the whole of the country’s working population went on strike, although, with the German enemy at the gates, there was ostensibly every good cause for keeping a united home front until the war had been won.

It was later asserted that the disaster was caused, above all, because of the division of government. After the March Revolution, ‘Establishment’ Russia—the
Stavka
generals, the Duma, the industrialists—came together as in the spring of 1915, and formed a Provisional Government. The revolutionary masses of Petrograd formed their own council, the Soviet, which faithfully recorded, at regular intervals, the temper of the masses, and which, from the beginning, was dominated by the left-wing parties.
A system of Soviets came into existence, more or less spontaneously, throughout the country: the men in army units, in factories, and, in the end, the villages as well set up such councils to safeguard the revolution and ensure its promotion. The Soviet’s order on army matters decreed an end to the humiliating rituals which ordinary soldiers had had to put up with, and henceforth officers’ authority could, in most units, be enforced only through agreement with the unit’s council, if then. The division of power between government and Soviet was, in fact, unreal. The government had control of the bureaucracy, but increasingly it lost control of the armed forces, and it owed most of its power to the Soviet. But the Soviet did not know how to use its power, and most of its early leaders earnestly wished that the Provisional Government would do the job. The Soviet had pledged itself, quite early on, to ‘peace without annexations or contributions’. But, as became increasingly clear, the German government was not interested in this, except from tactical motives, so that, unless the Soviet wanted to see Ludendorff invade Russia, it must go on fighting the war. In this event, power must be left to the generals. In the same way, the maintenance of the economy must be left to bankers and industrialists who understood these things. In due course, many Mensheviks thus found themselves striving to suggest to their followers that they should obey the prescriptions of a régime which they had themselves been elected to repudiate; and in time, prominent Soviet people were to join the Provisional Government—Kerenski being the best-known.

The system did not break down because of Bolshevik agitation alone. To begin with, the Bolsheviks were just as confused as the other parties. They too accepted that the revolution must be defended against German imperialism, and after the March Revolution were eager, to their subsequent embarrassment, to get back to normal—Kamenev and Stalin appealing for ‘order’ in the army and the factories, Gorki telling people to get back to work. It was only after Lenin’s return to Russia in April that the Bolsheviks adopted an out-and-out revolutionary programme: unremitting class-war in town and country, immediate peace, all power to the Soviets. Even then, many Bolsheviks regarded Lenin as a maniac, and in July his name was missed off a list of Anarchists and Bolsheviks drawn up to form a government. It was not until September that the Soviets became, in majority, Bolshevik; and even in November, it was more fear of counter-revolution than desire for power that drove the Bolsheviks into their November coup against the Provisional Government. Russia did not go Bolshevik because the masses were Bolshevik from the start of the Revolution, or because of the machinations of Soviet and Bolshevik leaders. She went Bolshevik because the old order collapsed,
more or less as Lenin—uniquely—had foretold it would. By the autumn of 1917, the towns were starving and disease-ridden; stratospheric inflation deprived wage-increases, indeed the whole economic life of the country, of meaning; production of war-goods fell back so far that the army could not fight, even if it had wanted to. Mines, railways, factories seized up. Kerenski and his sympathisers in the Soviets wished to restore things through co-operation with the old order. This programme did not work, for the economy collapsed in chaos, and the way was open to Lenin, who promised a new system altogether. Economic chaos drove Russia towards Bolshevism, sometimes despite the Bolsheviks.

This economic chaos was frequently ascribed quite simply to backwardness: Russia was not advanced enough to stand the strain of a war, and the effort to do so plunged her economy into chaos. But economic backwardness did not alone make for revolution, as the examples of Romania or Bulgaria showed; and in any case, Russia was not backward in the same way as these countries, as was shown in her capacity to make war-material in 1915–16. The economic chaos came more from a contest between old and new in the Russian economy. There was a crisis, not of decline and relapse into subsistence, but rather of growth. There was a sudden burst of progress during the war—much greater commercial activity, much greater labour-mobility, much more investment—and hence much greater exploitation of the country’s labour-force than before. Virtually for the first time, the Russian government prepared to spend money, instead of being bound, as in the past, by the narrowest of gold-standard orthodoxies. The result was a considerable economic explosion. It was shown in the wartime statistics of growth overall, particularly the delivery of war-material. It was shown in the great profits of 1915–16, in the boom of the Stock Exchange. It was also shown in the rise of banking, as the general level of economic activity forced banks to extend their business. The number of State Savings Banks doubled, to over 15,000, in the war-years; and more bank-branches were opened, between 1914 and 1917, than in the whole of Russia’s past.