Credit: Heeresgeschichtliches Museum, Wien
Somehow the vast Austrian cavalry screen missed the great bulk of the Russian army altogether, persuading Conrad that “there was no sign of any significant movement from the east against his right flank.”21 In his memoirs, the Russian Eighth Army’s Aleksei Brusilov expressed surprise at the “small number” of Austrian troops he encountered on the border around Tarnopol, and the alacrity with which those he did encounter surrendered, and divulged information. The Austrians, it turned out, believed that the Russians were taking time to complete their mobilization, not advancing.22 Austrian general Hermann Kövess’ Group—two corps screening eastern Galicia until the arrival of the rest of Second Army from Serbia—warned as early as August 23 that the entire Russian Eighth Army was massed around Proskurov and crossing the frontier. A plane was cautiously dispatched. “This afternoon an airplane will be sent to reconnoiter; officers must make sure that our troops don’t shoot it down,” an anxious staff officer wrote that day.23 The situation was worse than that: two Russian armies—the Eighth and the Third—were closing from the east. They had been marching in the cool nights and sheltering through the hot days in woods, thus avoiding aerial detection.24
Conrad was feeling better now; Gina had sent him a locket containing a miniature portrait of the Elder Moltke, the Prussian general who had crushed the Austrian army in 1866, and the Austrian chief looped it hopefully around his neck.25 But he was no Moltke, as was made plain by his mad decision to attack with such paltry forces into a vast space from which he would easily be engulfed from both flanks. The decision was even more baffling in view of the earlier Rückverlegung (backward movement) and the foot marches now required to reach forward positions that could have been reached earlier and more easily on the railroad. Conrad belatedly argued that this offensive north was the only means to secure the Galician capital of Lemberg as well as its oil wells, roads, and railways, catch the Russians off guard, and preempt their inevitable, overwhelming assault on the rest of Galicia, the Carpathians, and Hungary. On August 20, General Auffenberg traveled to Przemysl to meet with Conrad, Archduke Friedrich, and the new crown prince, Archduke Karl. Auffenberg expected to discuss operations; instead he found Conrad and Fritzl sitting in sulky silence. Potiorek had announced big victories in Serbia for the emperor’s birthday on August 18 but was now saying that he was beaten.
Both Conrad and Fritzl complained of German faithlessness and Moltke’s dogged focus on the Western Front, although the latter remonstrance struck Auffenberg as silly: “even the best commander cannot chase two rabbits at the same time.” The Germans would have to deal with the French and British and only then turn to the Eastern Front. Conrad had “nothing to say about his ideas for operations, and nothing to say about the enemy.” Fritzl’s face was “clouded with worry.” Only the crown prince was cheery, but that was because no one had bothered to brief him. Auffenberg also met with AOK’s German military mission—General Hugo Freytag-Loringhoven and Colonel Karl von Kageneck—and found them in a foul mood. The Germans had run out of patience with Conrad’s sluggish arrangements. Returning to his own army headquarters near Jaroslau, Auffenberg pronounced himself depressed. In his diary he wrote: “We’re not in a good situation. The war has been badly prepared and badly begun. The terrain is against us, as is the whole world. Even Japan has now declared war on Germany!”26
General Moritz von Auffenberg was a close confidant of Franz Ferdinand and had been war minister in 1911–1912. Given command of the Habsburg Fourth Army in 1914, Auffenberg did not conceal his nervousness. “We’re not in a good situation,” Auffenberg wrote as he prepared to invade Russia. “The war has been badly prepared and badly begun.”
Credit: National Archives
With the Germans still trying to win the war on the Bug by winning on the Seine, Conrad’s only real option was to wait. He had let Austria-Hungary’s advantage in the war’s early days dribble away. Instead of rushing forty divisions to the Russian border, Conrad had detoured to Serbia, let the thirty divisions that did reach Galicia off their trains far from the frontier, and then spent the last week of August and first days of September hauling in the last divisions of the Second Army at Stanislau on the Dniester. By then, the Russians had mobilized 2.7 million troops: ninety-six infantry and thirty-seven cavalry divisions. With numbers like this (and the Germans still focused on the Western Front), the Russian general headquarters (Stavka) could threaten a total encirclement of the little Austrian North Army. With two Russian armies (the Fourth and Fifth) in the north around Lublin and Chelm and two more armies (the Third and the Eighth) around Dubno in the south, the Russians threatened both of Conrad’s flanks. By attacking on the Vistula and south of Lemberg, they could surround the Austrians in the bowl between the San and the Carpathians.27
Conrad wasted more precious days pondering what to do, the reality of the Russian advance conflicting with his own increasingly deranged notions. Gina had pronounced him a Moltke, so a Moltke he would have to be. Late on August 22, Conrad finally spoke to his generals. He ordered General Moritz von Auffenberg’s Fourth Army at Jaroslau and Viktor Dankl’s First Army on its left to march northeast, Dankl toward Lublin and Auffenberg toward Chelm. General Rudolf Brudermann’s Third Army and the units of Second Army that had arrived from Serbia would strike east from Lemberg toward Brody. Reading Conrad’s orders at 8:00 p.m., Auffenberg was most struck by the fact that “they contained very detailed march tables, but no description of the overall plan, of what we were expected to do.” There was no Leitidee, no “guiding idea.”28 This was Conrad’s style—making things up as he went along, molding events retrospectively into firm plans if they succeeded and disowning them if they failed.
Conrad’s entire plan was flawed from the outset. Driving on Lublin and Chelm to cut the Russian railways to Warsaw and Brest-Litovsk and menace the Vistula forts from the south and east only made sense if the Germans were menacing them from the north and west. The Germans weren’t. They had been defeated on August 20 at Gumbinnen and were reorganizing their army in East Prussia. This meant that Conrad’s pincer, at best, would grab air; at worst, it would itself be mauled by Russian pincers and prevented from retiring in good order to the San, which shielded Cracow as well as the roads north and south into Germany and Austria-Hungary.
Conrad’s March 1914 plan had envisioned an attack by the nine divisions of Dankl’s First Army on the flank of any Russian forces that engaged the nine divisions of Auffenberg’s Fourth Army, with Böhm-Ermolli’s Second Army as a reserve. But as the Second Army dribbled in from Serbia, Conrad redirected it not toward Dankl and Auffenberg but toward Brudermann’s Third Army, which now faced the Russian Third and Eighth Armies. In fact, given the gathering Russian storm, the Second Army had to reinforce the Austrian right, but, thanks to Conrad’s Serbian excursion, it arrived too slowly to be of any use there either. As in Serbia, this meant that the Austrians would be too weak everywhere for a decisive battle anywhere. Dankl’s diary confirmed this: “Behind us,” he wrote, was “nothing”—just the possibility of a German corps that might push down to Tarnow or Cracow to connect the Austrian and German armies. There were otherwise no reserves to exploit a successful attack or rescue a failed one.
The three and a half Habsburg armies in Galicia were all that Austria-Hungary had to cope with the Russian steamroller. And they were not even formidable, Auffenberg feeling compelled to write his generals during the march to the frontier that “even though the Russian artillery has many more guns than we do, I’m convinced that the traditional excellence of our artillery will nullify that advantage.” He had to be joking. Russian heavy artillery and high explosives would make short work of Austrian “traditional excellence.” Auffenberg recalled learning more about the armies of Dankl and Brudermann from the heavily censored Austrian newspapers than from Conrad, who told his generals nothing about his plans as they matured. Auffenberg called this Conrad’s “system of secrets,” and the general staff
chief would later use it to rewrite the history of 1914 and cast himself as a victim of incompetent subordinates.29 Conrad retrospectively claimed that his three armies were part of a great interlocking system whose best defense was the offense—the First and Fourth Armies would wheel south to hit any Russian armies that attacked the bait of the Third Army in Galicia—but that was a brazen fabrication, and assumed far too much anyway: that the Habsburg field armies would be able to move fluidly along a three-hundred-mile front increasingly crowded with Russian forces.
Conrad’s maneuvering was even more astonishing in view of the fact that he had gamed this maneuver in early 1914 at a Generalbesprechung—generals’ conference—in Vienna involving all of the commanders now committed to the operation. Back then, one army had secured the flank and rear at Przemysl, while three armies had struck east to envelop the Russians. That was one army more than they had now, and even with four armies in the game, Conrad had noted the awesome difficulties: boggy roads, a rainy Baltic climate, and Russian fortifications at Warsaw and Ivangorod (Deblin) that would stop Austrian operations cold and require big (and presumably unavailable) German reinforcements.30
For all of his faults, Conrad at least directed the Austro-Hungarian war effort. Russian efforts were still disputed by multiple power centers, none of which had made up its mind how to fight this war. The scene of the Russian deployment posed tremendous challenges. Poland, a province of the Russian Empire since 1815, was a salient, with German East Prussia to the north, German Silesia to the west, and Austrian Galicia to the south—the “tongue of Poland” jutting from the Russian mouth. How to defend this salient and in which direction to launch offensives to aid Russia’s allies in the West became a political football lustily kicked around by the tsar’s generals.
Tsar Nicholas II had appointed his uncle, the fifty-eight-year-old Grand Duke Nikolai, commander of his vast army in 1914, but the grand duke’s Stavka did not wield real power. General Vladimir Sukhomlinov did. War minister since 1909, Sukhomlinov had emerged as the army’s Rasputin, a self-promoter who deftly played on the prejudices of the tsarina and insinuated himself into the tsar’s inner circle. He had structured the army more to augment his personal power than to project its own, shuffling the post of Russian general staff chief as many times in the seven years before 1914 as Germany had done in the previous hundred years.31 In these distracting office politics Sukhomlinov had a free hand, the tsar and tsarina protecting him despite revelations of corruption because of Sukhomlinov’s loyalty to the Romanovs (and Rasputin) and the general’s fashionable disdain for the Russian parliament or Duma.
What this meant in 1914 was that even as the Russian army deployed to the frontiers, it lacked the ability to settle on a coherent plan and shift reserves between the northern and southern groups. The army commands—a Northwest Front under General Yakov Zhilinsky and a Southwest Front under General Nikolai Ivanov—treated themselves as permanent fixtures, inelastic and irreducible, the prestige of their commanders (and Sukhomlinov, who mentored both) tied to the size of the force and the priority assigned it. Whereas the German and Austro-Hungarian headquarters could shuttle corps between their various fronts to reflect changing operational realities, the Stavka couldn’t. Even had Grand Duke Nikolai tried to shift resources from one army to another, he would have had to request the shift from Sukhomlinov, who would veto or amend it if it upset any of his protégés in the field armies. Given that the grand duke’s principal aides, Generals Nikolai Yanushkevich and Yuri Danilov, had been handpicked by Sukhomlinov (over the grand duke’s objections), there was no way for this to happen anyway. The grand duke would ask for changes and Yanushkevich would pronounce them logistically impossible.
Grand Duke Nikolai (l.), General Sukhomlinov (c.), and Tsar Nicholas II (r.) at Russian maneuvers just before the war. Though Nikolai would serve as commander in chief, Sukhomlinov had the tsar’s ear and wielded real power in the army. As wily and corrupt as Rasputin, Sukhomlinov confused more than aided the grand duke’s high command.
Credit: National Archives
As Conrad struggled to finish the war in Serbia and strike into Russia, the Russians struggled to agree on what they were doing. The grand duke’s new headquarters—halfway between the Northwest and Southwest Fronts, in a train on a siding in the town of Baranovichi in Belarus—was overshadowed by long-established, fixed Russian headquarters in Warsaw and Kiev, the first focused on the German threat (Russia’s prewar Plan G), the second on the Austro-Hungarians (Plan A). The Warsaw and Kiev headquarters were nurtured by Sukhomlinov, which meant that they had little need for the Stavka and no interest in cooperation with each other. The Warsaw generals knew they would need every available gun and bayonet against the Germans; the Kiev generals wanted to knock out Austria-Hungary first, not least because everyone feared for Poland if it was successfully invaded. The tsars had been repressing the Polish language, church, and nobility for more than fifty years, and if the Austrians or Germans gained a foothold in Russian Poland, they might actually be welcomed as liberators. The Stavka, under pressure from Paris and London to overweight the German option and take pressure off the Western Front, was supposed to resolve these debates but didn’t, the grand duke bursting into tears of frustration at his own impotence when appointed generalissimo by a tsar who neither liked nor trusted him, preferring Sukhomlinov for his military advice.32
Even though Russian prewar planning had called for a focus on Austria-Hungary and a strict defensive against the Germans, French pleas for a diversion in the east demanded a last-minute revision of the old Plan G and the preparation of an offensive. General Zhilinsky, who commanded the Northwest Front from headquarters at Bialystok, would be the man to lead the diversion. Another Sukhomlinovets, he had been Warsaw military governor before the war and the very man who had promised (in his own turn as Russian general staff chief in 1911) to deploy eight hundred thousand troops by M+15 to relieve pressure on the French.33 With twenty-five German corps swarming into France in August 1914, the tsar agreed to send Rennenkampf’s First Army and Samsonov’s Second marching into the lake and forest country of Masuria to distract the Germans. Entrusted with this distraction, Zhilinsky was unlikely now to see the wisdom of cooperation against the Austrians or a sharing of reserves, which were accumulating in the rear of the two fronts as Russia’s mobilization progressed. The Stavka ordered Zhilinsky’s two armies into East Prussia so abruptly that when they marched on August 17, they had fewer than four hundred thousand men, not the eight hundred thousand promised. Still, they outnumbered the Germans in the east two to one, which gave cause for hope.
The Russians now found themselves with thirty-four infantry divisions headed for East Prussia and forty-seven bound for Galicia.34 In the Southwest Front headquarters at Rovno, described by the British military attaché as “a typical Russian frontier town, dirty and dusty, the streets swarming with Jews who stare and gape at strangers,” General Nikolai Ivanov held sway; his staff chief was General Mikhail Alekseev.35 Ivanov disposed of four armies, General Anton Salza’s Fourth Army and General Pavel Plehve’s Fifth facing southwest from Lublin and Chelm, Nikolai Ruzski’s Third and Aleksei Brusilov’s Eighth facing west from Tarnopol—Ruzski north of the town around Dubno and Brody, Brusilov south of the town. Only two thin tributaries of the Dniester, the Zlota and Gnila Lipa streams, stood between him and Lemberg, the grand Galician capital.36 When not quarreling with Ivanov (the front commander), Alekseev (the front chief of staff) argued for a downward chop from the right against the Austrian lines of retreat to Cracow. Others argued for a flanking attack from the left that would roll around the Austrians from the south and trap them in a pocket between Lemberg and the Carpathians.
General Danilov at the Stavka pushed both plans, arguing that Russia’s superior strength would permit a double envelopment from both flanks of Conrad’s North Army. The Fourth and Fifth Armies would flank Conrad on the left, while the Third and Eighth Armies rolled up his right. Ivanov—a gruff, compete
nt veteran of the Russo-Japanese War—saw that he might annihilate the entire Austro-Hungarian army in a single battle. With just thirty-six divisions in the East, Conrad was already outnumbered two to one, a ratio that would worsen as the Russians brought more divisions up from the interior.37 Alekseev would have liked to advance his two armies on the left (the Third and Eighth) to gain the line of the San and trap the Austrians in Galicia, permitting an encirclement by the two armies on the right (the Fourth and Fifth). But with the French absorbing a quarter of a million casualties in the first month of the war, the Stavka decided to lead with the armies on the right, which were closer to German Silesia and more likely to get Berlin’s attention.38
A great encounter loomed, as both sides believed they were readying for a decisive blow—Conrad on the Bug, Ivanov on the San. Ivanov, who by now had learned a great deal about the thinness of the Austrian forces before him from talkative villagers along the Austrian march routes, saw that the way really was open to encircle Conrad’s North Army. The fifteen divisions of Salza’s Fourth Army and the eighteen divisions of Plehve’s Fifth Army would drive westward to cut Conrad’s communications with Cracow, Salza advancing on Rzeszow, Plehve on Rawa-Ruska. The eighteen divisions of Ruzski’s Third Army would drive into Lemberg, while the fifteen divisions of Brusilov’s Eighth Army crossed the Dniester south of the city to flank any Austro-Hungarian forces attempting to defend it. Centered behind this great movement, Plehve’s army was positioned to aid either push—the envelopment of Lemberg, or the thrust toward Cracow.39 The British military attaché recalled the excitement in Ivanov’s headquarters as battle approached, but also the pessimism expressed by a Russian gunner, who was a husband and a father of five. When someone slapped him on the back and assured him that he’d soon be home with his family, the gunner demurred: “They say it’s a wide road that leads to the war and only a narrow path that leads home again.”
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