The World Crisis

by Winston S. Churchill

  It was in these conditions that Scheffer and his three German divisions fought on all fronts, facing in every direction, during the whole of the 22nd November. We do not know what reports (if any) he was able to send to his superiors, but at any rate the army commander Mackensen, and presumably Hindenburg and Ludendorff, realized that all chance of netting the Russians in Lodz had failed. Tannenberg would not be repeated there. At seven o’clock in the evening orders reached Scheffer to retire by the best route possible. A glance at the map will show that Scheffer’s sixty thousand Germans were far more completely surrounded than Samsonov’s army had been at Tannenberg. Moreover, they were surrounded by vastly superior numbers. So far as strategy can achieve or maps record a situation, their destruction seemed certain; in fact, trains to carry twenty thousand prisoners were already ordered at the Warsaw railway centre.

  But now one of those homely truths of war proclaimed itself: a sharp knife will cut wood. By daybreak on November 23 Scheffer’s well-knit organization was marching due north against the Lovitch Force. On this date he engaged the 6th Siberian Division. This division fought well all day. Its commander, seeing himself confronted with overwhelming German masses advancing upon him in three columns, cried out for help in all directions. Such was the confusion and failure of communications that he did not know that these German columns were themselves recoiling from the onset of the superior Fifth Russian Army which was following them up.

  ‘The commander of the 1st Corps,’ says Knox, ‘was implored to move, but he and his troops, having been badly hustled, had been cowed into passivity. They—or, probably, only he and his staff—lacked the reserve of moral stamina for renewed effort. He hesitated (to pursue) and, finally, decided to ask the army commander. The latter did nothing.’

  The 6th Siberian Division also called on the rest of the Lovitch Force to come to their assistance, but so predominant was the terror of the German armies at this time in the minds of Russian divisional and corps commanders that no effective measures were taken. Accordingly, on the 24th November, Scheffer destroyed the 6th Siberian Division.

  ‘That Division, finding itself enfiladed in every direction and abandoned, retired during the morning of the 24th, and, finding Germans already in Breziny, dispersed in every direction.’

  Barely fifteen hundred Siberians escaped. Scheffer then marched north-west and resumed his station between the 1st Reserve and XXth Corps of the German Ninth Army. His men had fought and marched continuously every day for at least nine days; they had almost encircled a Russian Army. Completely surrounded themselves by hordes of enemies, they had cut their way through, losing scarcely any guns or prisoners and carrying with them through the midst of these perils and manœuvres nearly all their own wounded and ten thousand Russian captives. It should be added that the weather during this period was exceptionally severe. The temperature at night fell to within ten degrees (F.) of zero. According to Danilov: ‘The frost was becoming intensified, with icy winds, and with no prospect of snow and its accompanying rise in temperature.’

  Thus ended the Battle of Lodz, in which a quarter of a million Germans were pitted against between five and six hundred thousand Russians; in which the Germans only just failed to surround and capture a hundred and fifty thousand Russians; and in which the Russians clutched, surrounded, but failed to hold sixty thousand Germans. No exact information of the casualties is at present to hand, but certainly we shall not exaggerate if we say that the Germans had thirty-five thousand killed and wounded and the Russians at least double that number, with twenty-five thousand prisoners taken in addition. Both sides shook themselves clear of this dreadful close. Breathless and exhausted, the Russians held Lodz until December 6, when they rearranged their line to the south of Warsaw. The Germans remained in close contact along their front and occupied Lodz in due course without further fighting.

  All hopes of a Russian advance into Silesia had been effectually frustrated.

  All the Cabinets of the Allies had taken it for granted that Serbia would be destroyed in the Great War soon and easily by the might of Austria. However, when we left the Serbians in the last week of August, not a man of the Imperial armies remained on Serbian soil. The Austrians had rushed in, and had been flung out. They had wasted on the Drina and the Save the soldiers desperately needed in Galicia. There was a pause. Early in September Putnik’s First Army raiding across the Save maintained itself precariously for a week on Hungarian soil. Potiorek was able to drive them out; but his further efforts in September foundered upon Serbian defensive tenacity. Whether he pressed with his Sixth Army across the Drina to threaten Putnik’s left, or tried to cut in behind his right, or when he attacked in the centre, he was equally brought to a standstill, often in sodden, low-lying fields, always with grievous losses. Both armies—the Serbs had been fighting since 1912—were exhausted. Putnik, urged on by Russia to strike a further blow for the common cause, made by an excursion into southern Bosnia an alarming threat against the communications of the Austrian Sixth Army, with Sarajevo as his goal. It took Potiorek most of October to evict the raiders; but he could not drive them from Semlin which they had entered at the end of September, nor, worst of all, could the Austrian troops cope with the trench warfare which had developed all along the front.

  By November Bosnia was cleared of its Serbian invaders, and both sides prepared themselves for a final effort. The Serbs were encouraged chiefly by rumours—the Russians, even the Greeks, were coming to their aid, some British sailors and naval guns had actually arrived. Putnik however, inferior in artillery, short of munitions, disorganized—several-fold decimated—determined to quit the dangerous angle of the great rivers and retire upon Valjevo and the Kolubara. The initiative passed to the Austrians. Potiorek’s last chance had come. Using his unfading influence with the Emperor’s circle, he scraped and scratched from Conrad’s hard-pressed armies, and from their joint munitions supply, the means for a new offensive. He advanced on the familiar double-pincers plan. By November 15 Valjevo, Putnik’s Headquarters in the Jadar battle, fell to the Austrian Sixth Army. The Serbians recoiled before the onset, and by the 22nd Potiorek’s line was established across the Kolubara and he had captured with hard fighting and heavy casualties eight thousand Serbian prisoners and forty guns. Here at any rate was a success, or something which might be represented as such. Here, as the Austrian history tells us, he might well have paused.

  But Potiorek, though cautious of his person, was vigorous in thought. He saw the Serbs as a beaten enemy to be pursued. Belgrade lay near, and with it the longed-for railway which opened to the Central Powers the road to Turkey. And above all, almost within his grasp, the nearer Obrenovatz-Valjevo railway offered at last a new line of supply, a priceless relief to his present overtaxed and far-stretched communications running back behind the Drina. Despite deep snow in the mountains, rain below, appalling roads, shortage of food and an army dispirited, almost in rags, divided in its loyalties, he pressed on. In the battle of the Kolubara which followed, the Austrian armies drove forward another dozen miles.

  Putnik’s leadership was not unworthy of his indomitable soldiers. Driven to the decision of a lifetime, he abandoned Belgrade. He swung back his right till it faced northwest. His left, the critical pivot, meant to hold fast at all costs, gave way under the pressure of the Austrian Sixth Army. But at the same time, when all seemed lost, the pursuing Austrians themselves subsided through sheer exhaustion: and from that moment the tide turned. Austrian troops might enter Belgrade; Potiorek, courtier like, might announce its capture to the Emperor as a greeting for his eighty-fourth birthday. But the Serbian nation, which was now its army, gathered itself for a supreme effort. Old King Peter, entering the trenches rifle in hand among his soldiers, appealed to his fierce countrymen. The Austrians were at the end of their tether; the Serbian counter-offensive began. On December 3 all their armies attacked; the First turned savagely on the Austrians in the hills, the Third advanced in the centre: the Second in the north met
Potiorek’s expiring effort to lap round their weak right wing. Irresistibly the north-west drive of the Serbian Second Army surged forward, threatening at once to cut off Potiorek’s enveloping troops. On December 9, after nearly a week’s confused but severe fighting, the outermost Austrian division was recalled. Said the telephone from Headquarters: “All has been in vain. Make no more efforts; we must go back; the order follows.”

  It was time. Potiorek’s armies were cleft asunder. His Fifth army was bunched up around Belgrade; and his Sixth with the Serbians at their heels was in full flight for Shabatz. By December 15 the third Austrian assault upon Serbia had been flung back in utter rout across the river into the lands whence they came. The hated pig-farmers of Serbia, for the sake of whose punishment almost the whole world had been plunged in war, had added to the Austrian annals this most ignominious, rankling and derisory defeat. It brought one advantage in its train. It was the end of Potiorek. The prodigy of the Serbian resistance was hardly comprehended by the busy world at war; but those who were best informed were the most astonished.

  It is necessary to mention here the fortunes of the Turkish armies that invaded the Caucasus in pursuance of the long-cherished plan of Young Turkey. Enver Pasha, assuming direct command, concentrated at Erzerum the three corps (IXth, Xth, XIth) stationed in peace in Armenia, reinforcing them with a division from Bagdad, and bringing by sea from Constantinople the 1st Corps, two more divisions, to Trebizond. The Turkish Third Army so formed comprised nearly 150,000 men; while on the Russian side Voronzov, his forces depleted in order to swell the Galician armies, could muster but 100,000.

  Voronzov had struck the first blow. In November he had thrust across the frontier to Koprikeui, 30 miles short of Erzerum. Here he had been confronted by Enver’s XIth Corps. But Enver’s plan was developing. The Russian army at Sarikamish was wholly dependent upon the railway from Tiflis and Kars. Enver, with Colonel von Schellenberg as Chief of the Staff, aimed the usual German turning movement at this vital line of communication. Holding the Russians frontally he sent his IXth and Xth Corps to turn their right and descend through the passes upon the Kars-Sarikamish railway. Meanwhile much farther to the north the Turkish Ist Corps drove down the Choruk valley, whence they too were to close in on the Tiflis railway. This plan in such a country and at this season was foolhardy. The Ist Corps in particular had to cross, at 8,000 feet in the depth of winter, the snow-bound passes leading down to Ardahan.

  By the New Year the troops engaged in these desperate endeavours were in extremity. Struggling in snow-drifts through the rocky defiles by which alone advance was possible, lashed by incessant blizzard, in hideous privation, their columns were encountered each in turn by the Russians along the Sarikamish front. On New Year’s Day Yudenitch, the local Russian commander, repelled the Xth Corps finally from his vital railway. The IXth thus stripped of support was enveloped and destroyed. Its commander and his staff surrendered. Fifty miles to the northward, the Ist Corps persisted in its fantastically-conceived mission. It actually succeeded in crossing the passes to Ardahan, to the amazement and alarm of the Russian headquarters. But there its effort died. A counter-attack drove the frozen and gasping Turks back into the icy wastes through which they had descended. Only the XIth Corps, for a while, played its part. Around Kara Urgan, in a gallant effort at least to cover the retreat of the remnants of the IXth and Xth, it made some headway; but by mid-January Yudenitch was able to concentrate against it. In a few days, after heavy loss, it was forced to retreat to Erzerum with the horrors of winter and famine added to military defeat.

  Thus at length the skilful and determined Russian defence achieved a victorious fulfilment. By the last days of January the tables in this desperate game had been completely turned. Yudenitch, almost by standing still, aided by those elements the Turks had ignored, had robbed them of the rewards of their wildly audacious manœuvre and intense efforts. They perished in their attempt. Individuals escaped to tell the tale; but in the mountains above Sarikamish alone the corpses of 30,000 frozen soldiers were discovered and counted by the Russian patrols. Thus the situation in the Caucasus, which at the close of the year had seemed almost forlorn, was within a fortnight decisively retrieved.

  CHAPTER XVII

  EAST OR WEST?

  The end of the year and the severities of winter closed what has been called ‘The Second Round’ of the struggle. In the West after the battle of Ypres, in the East after the battle of Lodz, the fronts became stationary in close contact behind ever-growing entrenchments. Sovereigns, statesmen and commanders on both sides surveyed the ghastly scene, weighed the results of all the battles, and set themselves to plan the future. An immense feeling of relief inspired the leaders of the Allies. The terrific onslaught of Germany upon France had failed. Time would now be given for the whole armed strength of the British Empire to be brought to bear. The naval victory of the Falkland Islands had exterminated the German cruiser warfare. The British command alike of the oceans and the narrow seas was absolute. Very large surplus naval forces released from the cruiser warfare came back into the hands of the Admiralty. The blockade of the enemy Empires was complete and its pressures began to grow.

  Different indeed were the feelings with which the German Chiefs measured the past and faced the future. They had no illusions upon the results which had so far declared themselves. Although their armies stood almost everywhere on conquered soil and they disposed of enormous and still-growing resources, they cast about earnestly for some means of escape from the deadly toils into which they had incontinently plunged. The causes of British and French satisfaction were perfectly appreciated by them, and struck a knell in their hearts. To the problems of their Generals the German Chancellor and Foreign Office now made an unwelcome contribution. All hopes of inducing Italy or Roumania to join them had long vanished. On Christmas Day Count Czernin, Austrian Ambassador at Bucharest, had declared to Conrad that Italy and Roumania ‘would enter the war upon the side of the Entente, unless the Central Empires could achieve a far-reaching victory by the spring.’ Italy was pressing with increasing plainness and slowly unveiling menace her demands for grievous cessions of Austrian territory. Roumania seemed to be keeping step with Italy, and a hostile declaration by both Powers might well be simultaneous.

  It became obvious that the attitude of the Balkan States was of decisive importance. Turkey—the one new adherent—had been defeated in the Caucasus, and was already in internal stress. No military communication existed between her and the Central Powers. Serbia had not been defeated, on the contrary, she was triumphant; Bulgaria had not been won over; Greece was adverse; and Roumania refused to allow the transport of munitions to Turkey. Already on December 14 General von der Goltz had written from Constantinople to Falkenhayn that the decision of the whole war rested with the small Balkan powers. Their by no means negligible forces and influence might turn the scale either way. It was evident to the German Foreign Office that the whole of the Balkan States and Italy might come into the war against the Teutonic and Turkish Empires. This would involve the speedy collapse of Austria-Hungary, the destruction of Turkey, and the final fatal isolation of Germany. All this pointed to the strongest action against Russia, to the imperative upholding of Austria, and to opening direct access to Turkey. To the East must the Germans go. Conrad, on December 27, telegraphed to Falkenhayn:

  ‘Complete success in the Eastern theatre is still, as hitherto, decisive for the general situation and extremely urgent…. Rapid decision and rapid execution are absolutely necessary if the intervention of neutrals, which is certainly to be expected at the latest at the beginning of March, is to be forestalled.’

  ​HL reinforced these claims by arguments of their own; and here we must note a real and only partly unconscious cleavage of interest and opinion which opened in the German supreme war-control. The German generals who had fought in the West had, since the French had turned at the Marne and begun to use their artillery and rifles, met with no success; and in war, whi
ch is always unfair, lack of success is serious. They had been unpleasantly surprised by the obstinacy of the French in defence. They had not believed them capable of such unsensational stubbornness. They were even more astonished by being forced to take the British Army seriously. They now realized that they were in the West confronted by troops and military organizations of the highest order. The German generals in the East, on the other hand, had gained splendid victories. There were no trench lines, no high-class riflemen, few machine-guns and only a comparatively weak artillery. There, was the opportunity for manœuvre, and for that large kind of tactics or battlefield strategy which manifests itself through the adroit use of a superior railway system. In the East great victories had been won, with hundreds of thousands of captives, and whole hostile armies destroyed, as the result of what were undoubtedly finely-conceived manœuvres modelled upon the classics of war. All Germany shone with the glory of Tannenberg. The Supreme Command, which had been thankful to see the failure of the Marne thus masked, now found with some disquietude that they cut a less impressive figure in the national eye than the triumphant warriors of the East. Hindenburg and Ludendorff, while comporting themselves with decorum, met in conferences men who, though in a superior station, bore the taint of failure. But the Supreme Command with its galaxy of Generals and Staff Officers, albeit discomfited, held nearly all the machinery of the German Army and five-sixths of its strength. Patriotism, public service, military discipline, personal courtesy, spread their emollients upon the sore places. Still the underlying facts remained; and the East said in unspoken words, ‘Why don’t you let us go on winning the war for you?’ and the West replied by thunderous looks, ‘Win the war! Why, you have only been collecting Russians!’