On December 20, 1916, the Tsarevich paid his last visit to Army Headquarters. A few days later, he was to leave for Tsarskoe Selo for the winter; before spring, revolution would sweep his father off the throne. On that night, General Hanbury-Williams received word from England that his eldest son, an officer with the British army in France, had died as a result of wounds. As the General sat alone with his grief in his tiny, barren room, the door quietly opened. It was Alexis, saying, “Papa told me to come to sit with you as he thought you might feel lonely tonight.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“Poor Fellows, They Are Ready to Give Their Lives for a Smile”
VICTORY on the Marne and disaster at Tannenberg tended to dim the result of a third great battle fought in the opening weeks of war. Even as Rennenkampf’s Cossacks rode through East Prussian barnyards, the main mass of the Austro-Hungarian army, one million strong, launched itself north from Galicia intending to amputate Poland from Russia. Within less than three weeks, the Russians had stopped and smashed these invaders. Four Austro-Hungarian armies were routed, two hundred thousand prisoners and Lemberg, the capital of the province, were taken, and Russian cavalry crossed the Carpathians to ride out onto the great Danube plain toward Budapest and Vienna. In terror, hinting that it might be forced to a separate peace, the Austrian government appealed to Berlin for help.
The German General Staff ordered Hindenburg to rush reinforcements. On September 14, 1914, two German army corps headed south from East Prussia; four days later, Hindenburg raised the rescue force by two additional army corps and a cavalry division. Even this help might not have been enough if the Russian offensive had not suddenly halted of its own accord. The source of this command—inexplicable and keenly frustrating to front-line generals who sensed a chance to knock Austria-Hungary out of the war—was Paris. On September 14, Paléologue received a telegram from his government. “It instructs me to impress on the Russian government that it is essential for the Russian armies to press home their direct offensive against Germany,” he wrote. “[We are] afraid that our Allies may have had their heads turned by their relatively easy successes in Galicia and may neglect the German front in order to concentrate on forcing their way to Vienna.” On the Tsar’s command, to accommodate the wishes of his ally, the triumphant Russians began receding from the Carpathians. Two of the four Russian armies in Galicia were shifted north to begin a fruitless attack on German Silesia. Again, Russia had made a gallant and expensive gesture toward her hard-pressed ally. But it represented a gross violation of sound military strategy as nicely expressed by the old Russian proverb: “If you chase two hares, you won’t catch either.” Russia’s chance to crush Austria-Hungary at the outset was lost.
In the early battles of 1914, the Russians learned that the Austrians were a far weaker foe than the Germans. Fighting Austrians soon came to be considered almost unworthy by Russian officers. Knox discovered this feeling among twenty young subalterns just posted from artillery school: “The poor boys were keen as mustard and told me that their one fear was lest they might be employed till the end of the war against the Austrians and never have a dash at the Prussians.”
The Russians also discovered on every battlefield that dash and bravery were not enough. The Russian cavalry, carrying long lances and swinging sabers, rode exuberantly to meet the Prussian Uhlans and Austrian Hussars. The Russian infantry, wielding vicious four-edged bayonets, willingly attacked whatever positions their officers indicated. But where those positions were defended by superior artillery and plentiful machine guns, the charging Russian ranks were scythed like rows of wheat. By the end of 1914, after only five months of war, one million Russians—one quarter of the army—had been killed, wounded or taken prisoner.
Among the officers, the ratio of loss was far higher. Unlike German and Austrian officers, who took sensible precautions, Russian officers considered it cowardly to take cover. Attacking in the face of murderous enemy fire, the officers made their men crawl forward on the ground while they themselves stood erect and walked into the enemy bullets. The famous Preobrajensky Guard Regiment lost 48 of its 70 officers; the 18th Division had only 40 of its original 370 officers. “These people play at war,” said Knox sadly.
To make good these losses, three thousand military cadets were commissioned early and sent to the front. Fifteen thousand university students, originally deferred from military service, were ordered to take four months of military training and become lieutenants. Orders were given to curb the flamboyant, wasteful bravery of young officers. “Remember what I am going to say to you,” said the Tsar on October 1, 1914, addressing a company of cadets promoted to lieutenant. “I have not the slightest doubt of your courage and bravery, but I need your lives, because useless losses in the officer corps may lead to serious consequences. I am sure that every one of you will give his life willingly when it becomes necessary, but do it only in cases of exceptional emergency. In other words, I am asking you to care for yourselves.”
Despite their sacrifices, the Russians began the war as a gentlemanly undertaking. Captured enemy officers were not questioned; it was considered improper to ask a brother officer to inform on his compatriots. In time, the relentlessness of the German combative spirit was to alter these generous feelings. One German officer, being carried wounded from the battlefield, drew his revolver and shot his stretcher bearers. Later, the Tsar was to write, “We take no prisoners where the enemy uses explosive bullets.”
Much of the power and resilience of the Russian army lay in its religious faith. Knox was enormously impressed by the simple, unquestioning belief, permeating all ranks, that prayer would lead to victory. In an underground hut near the front, he once listened to a Russian general discussing tactics with a group of Russian officers. “Then,” wrote Knox, “in the simplest possible way, without any hypocritical flourish … he added, ‘You must always remember, too, the value of prayer—with prayer you can do anything.’ So sudden a transition from professional technicalities to simple primary truths seemed incongruous, and gave me almost a shock, but was taken quite naturally by the officers crowding around, with serious, bearded faces, in the little dugout. This religious belief is a power in the Russian army.”
Knox watched a regiment of veterans drawn up on parade. Near the front, “The General … thanked them in the name of the Emperor and the country for their gallant service.… It was touching to see how the men were moved by his simple words of praise.… The latter leaned over and chucked men here and there under the chin as he rode along. ‘Poor fellows,’ he said as we drove away, ‘they are ready to give their lives for a smile.’ ”
The difference that faith could make was demonstrated on every battlefront. At Easter in 1916, a German attack was launched near the Baltic. At five a.m., German artillery began pounding the Russian trenches cut into the marshy ground. At the same time, the Germans released gas into the Russian lines. The Russians, lacking both gas masks and steel helmets, endured. After each hour of bombardment, the German artillery paused to learn the effect on the Russian trenches. Always, there was a resumption of rifle fire from the Russians, followed by a new German bombardment. After five hours of this devastation, Russian battalions of 500 men were reduced to 90 or 100. Yet when the German infantry finally advanced, it was met by a Russian bayonet charge. In all that day, the Russians gave up only a mile and half of front. That night, from within the Russian lines the Germans heard the sound of hundreds of men singing the Easter hymn, “Christ is risen from the dead, conquering death by death.”
Despite the huge losses of the previous autumn, the coming of spring 1915 found the Russian army again ready for battle. Its strength, down to 2,000,000 men in December 1914, had swollen to 4,200,000 as new drafts of recruits arrived at the front. In March, the Russians attacked, hurling themselves again on the Austrians in Galicia. They had immediate, brilliant success. Przemysl, the strongest fortress in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, fell on March 19 with 120,000 prisoners and 900 gun
s. “Nikolasha [Grand Duke Nicholas] came running into my carriage out of breath and with tears in his eyes and told me,” wrote Nicholas. A Te Deum in the church “was packed with officers and my splendid Cossacks. What beaming faces!” In his joy, the Tsar presented the Grand Duke with an ornamental golden sword of victory, its hilt and scabbard studded with diamonds. Early in April, the Tsar himself entered the conquered province, driving along hot roads covered with white dust. In Przemysl, he admired the fortress—“colossal works, terribly fortified, not an inch of ground remained undefended.” In Lemberg, he spent the night in the house of the Austrian governor-general, occupying a bed hitherto reserved exclusively for the Emperor Franz Joseph.
Once again, waves of Russian infantry and horsemen rolled exultantly up to the Carpathians. The peaks, craggy and thickly forested, were desperately defended by crack Hungarian regiments. Because of their pitiful lack of heavy artillery and ammunition, the Russians were unable to bombard the heights before their attacks. Instead, each hill, each ridge, each crest had to be stormed by bayonet. Advancing with what Ludendorff described as “supreme contempt for death,” the Russian infantry swept upward, leaving the hillsides soaked with blood. By mid-April, the Carpathian passes were in Russian hands and General Brusilov’s Eighth Army was descending onto the Danubian plain. Again Vienna trembled; again there was talk of a separate peace. On April 26, 1915, convinced that the Hapsburg empire was collapsing, Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary.
It was at this moment that Hindenburg and Ludendorff let fall on Russia the monster blow which for months they had been preparing. Having failed to destroy France in 1914, the German General Staff had selected 1915 as the year to drive Russia out of the war. Through March and April, while the Russians devastated the Austrians in Galicia and the Carpathians, the German generals calmly and efficiently massed men and artillery in southern Poland. On May 2, 1,500 German guns opened fire on a single sector of the Russian line. Within a four-hour period, 700,000 shells fell into the Russian trenches.
“From a neighboring height one could see an uninterrupted line of enemy fire for five miles to each side,” wrote Sir Bernard Pares, who witnessed the bombardment. “The Russian artillery was practically silent. The elementary Russian trenches were completely wiped out and so, to all intents and purposes, was human life in that area. The Russian division stationed at this point was reduced from a normal 16,000 to 500.”
In this maelstrom, the Russian line disintegrated. Reinforcements were brought by train directly to the battlefield and detrained under fire. The Third Caucasian Corps, rushed into the breach, was quickly reduced from 40,000 men to 6,000; even this remnant, attacking at night with bayonets, took 7,000 prisoners. The Russian Third Army, which took the brunt of the German blow, had—said its commander—“lost all its blood.” On June 2, the fortress of Przemysl was lost. Lemberg fell on June 22. “Poor Nikolasha,” wrote the Tsar, “while telling me this, wept in my private room and even asked whether I thought of replacing him by a more capable man.… He kept thanking me for staying here, because my presence here supported him personally.”
In the retreat, men lost their rifles or flung them away. The shortage quickly became desperate; one officer suggested arming some battalions with long-handled axes. “In recent battles, a third of the men had no rifles,” reported General Belaiev from Stavka. “These poor devils had to wait patiently until their comrades fell before their eyes and they could pick up weapons. The army is drowning in its own blood.” Unarmed men, waiting in support trenches until casualties on the firing line made weapons available, were “churned into gruel” by exploding shells and bursting shrapnel. The men understood what was happening. “You know, sir, we have no weapons except the soldier’s breast,” an infantry private said to Pares. “This is not war, sir, this is slaughter.”
Nothing could stem the German columns advancing through the deep summer dust of Poland. Ahead of them came the long, slow-moving lines of refugees, trudging eastward. So intense was their suffering that a Russian general who had always been friendly suddenly turned on Knox and demanded to know what the British were doing in the war. “We are playing the game,” said the Russian, distracted with anguish. “We are giving everything. Do you think it is easy for us to look at those long columns of refugees flying before the German advance? We know that all those children crowded on those carts will die before the winter is out.” Knox, overcome by the tragedy, bowed his head and did not speak.
On August 5, 1915, Warsaw fell. For Grand Duke Nicholas, Russian strategy had become a question not of saving Warsaw or even Poland, but of preserving the army. Like Kutuzov in 1812, he retreated, giving up villages, towns, even provinces, intent only on keeping the army intact. Through it all, the Russian soldiers never lost their fighting spirit. On the day Warsaw fell, Knox visited officers of the Preobrajensky Guard. He found them still joking. “We will retire to the Urals,” they explained, “and when we get there the enemy’s pursuing army will have dwindled to a single German and a single Austrian. The Austrian will, according to custom, give himself up as a prisoner, and we will kill the German.”
The ordeal of the Russian army in the spring and summer of 1915 seared all who survived. Half of the army was destroyed: 1,400,000 men were killed or wounded, 976,000 became prisoners. “The spring of 1915 I shall remember all my life,” wrote General Deniken. “The retreat from Galicia was one vast tragedy for the Russian army.… The German heavy artillery swept away whole lines of trenches, and their defenders with them. We hardly replied—there was nothing with which we could reply. Our regiments, although completely exhausted, were beating off one attack after another by bayonet.… Blood flowed unendingly, the ranks became thinner and thinner. The number of graves constantly multiplied.…” *
It was impossible to hide from the country what was happening at the front. The gaudy optimism which had placed the Russian Guards on the Unter den Linden in less than six months was replaced by pessimism and gloom. There were no great balls that winter in the gray, snow-covered cities of Russia; the young men who had danced so gaily two winters before lay dead in the forests of East Prussia or on the slopes of the Carpathians. On the Nevsky Prospect, there were no flags, no bands playing the national anthem, no cheering crowds, only silent groups standing in the cold reading the casualty lists posted in shopwindows. In hospital wards across the land lay the wounded soldiers, patient, gentle, grateful as children. “Nitchevo—it is nothing, little sister,” they responded to sympathy. Only rarely did the nurses hear a low-voiced “I suffer, little sister.”
The thrilling sense of national unity which had so profoundly moved the Tsar in the Winter Palace and the Kremlin had evaporated, and in its place surged all the old suspicions, quarrels and hatreds. Worst was the hatred of everything German. In Petrograd, Bach, Brahms and Beethoven were banned from orchestra programs. The windows of German bakeries were broken, and exclusive German schools were threatened with arson. At Christmas in 1914, the Holy Synod had foolishly banned Christmas trees as being a German custom. “I am going to make a row,” wrote the Empress to the Tsar when she heard about it. “Why take away the pleasure from the wounded and children because it originally comes from Germany? The narrow mindedness is too colossal.”
Anti-German feeling was strongest in Moscow. French-speaking people riding Moscow streetcars found themselves hissed as “Nemtsy” [Germans] by Russians who understood no foreign tongue. Bitter stories were told about the German-born Empress. The most popular of these tales concerned a general, walking along a corridor of the Winter Palace, who came upon the Tsarevich, weeping. Patting the boy on the head, the general asked, “What is wrong, my little man?” Half smiling, half crying, the Tsarevich replied, “When the Russians are beaten, Papa cries. When the Germans are beaten, Mama cries. When am I to cry?”
With the defeat of the supposedly invincible Russian army, the people of Moscow rushed into the streets to take vengeance. For three days beginning June 10, 1915, shops, fact
ories and private houses belonging to people with German names were sacked and burned. “The country house of Knop, the great Russo-German millionaire who more than any man helped to build up the Russian cotton industry … was burned to the ground,” wrote the British Consul, R. H. Bruce Lock-hart. “The police could or would do nothing.… I stood and watched while hooligans sacked the leading piano store of Moscow. Bechsteins, Blüthners, grand pianos, baby grands, and uprights, were hurled one by one from the various stories to the ground.”
In Red Square, a mob shouted open insults to the Imperial family, demanding that the Empress be shut up in a convent, the Tsar deposed, Rasputin hanged and Grand Duke Nicholas crowned as Nicholas III. From Red Square, the crowd surged to the Convent of Mary and Martha, where the Empress’s sister Grand Duchess Elizabeth met them at the gate. There were wild, accusing shouts that she was giving sanctuary to a German spy and that she was hiding her brother Grand Duke Ernest of Hesse. The Grand Duchess, standing alone in white-and-gray robes, calmly invited the leaders to search the house to see for themselves that her brother was not there. As she answered, a stone landed at her feet. “Away with the German woman!” shouted the crowd, just as a company of soldiers arrived to drive them off.
Within the government, military defeat and the nation’s anger brought swift political repercussions. General Sukhomlinov, at last at a loss to explain away the desperate lack of guns and munitions with another amusing story, was swept away on June 20. On June 27, the Tsar, calling on “all faithful sons of the Fatherland without distinction of class or opinion, to work together with one heart and mind to supply the needs of the army,” announced that the Duma would be summoned “in order to hear the voice of the land of Russia.” A new Special Defense Council, including both ministers of the government and leaders of the Duma, was formed. These were hopeful signs, but they were appearing late. General Polivanov, Sukhomlinov’s successor as Minister of War, a vigorous, brusque, efficient man, spoke frankly to his fellow ministers at a meeting of the ministerial council on July 16. “I consider it my duty to declare to the Council of Ministers that the country is in danger,” he declared. “Where our retreat will end, only God knows.”
Nicholas and Alexandra: The Classic Account of the Fall of the Romanov Dynasty Page 40