A Mad Catastrophe

by Geoffrey Wawro

  In view of the Habsburg army’s collapse, German troops would somehow have to be found for the Eastern Front. The Austro-German alliance was already unraveling under the strain of the conflicting priorities of Berlin and Vienna, which were succinctly put by the new Austro-Hungarian ambassador in Berlin, Prince Gottfried von Hohenlohe: “Bethmann Hollweg now speaks of Germany’s primary aim as ‘securing Germany’s future’; for us, the same principle of a ‘secure future’ applies, but can be only achieved through a defeat of Russia, whereas the German future depends first and foremost on the defeat of France and England.”11 The Austrians worried that the Germans, blinded by “hysterical Anglophobia,” might themselves rush to conclude a separate peace with Russia before the fatal “imbalance of power” in the east had been corrected.

  Vienna assumed that Berlin might even barter Austrian territory to get the territorial gains the Germans wanted in Belgium and France. Thus, Hohenlohe defined his diplomatic task as “creating a mood” in Berlin that would see “Germany’s future secured through total victory in the east—through the total annihilation of Russia.”12 That was not exactly Berlin’s mood, but the Germans did recognize that they had little choice but to thrust into Poland, restore Austrian confidence, and force back the Russian steamroller. If the Austrians, clinging to a narrow strip between Cracow and the Carpathians, were pushed over the mountains and the Russians pursued them into Hungary, then German Silesia would be outflanked and probably lost. Germany’s only European ally would also be lost, leaving Berlin without the Austrian army or even the fig leaf of a “coalition” to disguise its vast ambitions. In mid-September, the kaiser and his generals agreed that “direct assistance to the Austrians is now politically essential.”13

  While the Germans planned to rescue the Austrians by invading Russia, the Russians were planning to rescue the French by invading Germany. French ambassador Maurice Paléologue shuttled between the tsar, Sukhomlinov, and the grand duke deploring Russia’s focus on Austria-Hungary and reminding the Russians that “the surest way to beat Austria is to beat Germany.” When Sukhomlinov protested that his army had lost 110,000 men at Tannenberg trying to beat Germany, Paléologue countered that fresh efforts were needed, and soon. France had lost half a million men in its first battles with the Germans and was on the ropes.14

  After peevish negotiations in the last days of September, Grand Duke Nikolai did agree to launch a drive on Berlin as soon as he had finished off the Austrians, but Tsar Nicholas II overruled his uncle, insisting that the attack on Germany begin at once. This was good news for the Austrians, and bad for the Russians. The grand duke pulled twelve corps out of Galicia and added them to eight fully mobilized armies—three in the center, two each on the flanks, and another in East Prussia. He would drive back any German attacks and then deliver the relief that the French and British had been demanding since August: a Russian thrust with two million men through Silesia to Berlin. General Nikolai Yanushkevich, the grand duke’s staff chief, ordered “preparation of an offensive, of the greatest possible weight, with a view to deep invasion of Germany, proceeding from the middle Vistula to the upper Oder.” This, of course, was easier said than done; it had been Russian policy before the war not to build hardened roads and railways west of Warsaw, in order to slow down any German invasion of Russia. No thought had been given to how this would affect a Russian invasion of Germany.15

  But with just seven German corps against this gathering Russian horde, the Germans were not idly awaiting the grand duke’s drive on Berlin. Their roads were good, at least as far as Poland. Hindenburg and his staff chief, Ludendorff, planned a late autumn campaign across the Narew and toward Warsaw, to unhinge and throw back the Russians. With East Prussia secured by Tannenberg, Hindenburg sought a similar decisive result in Poland that would justify a reorientation of German strategy—an Ostaufmarsch or “eastern deployment” instead of the apparently fruitless western one still being pursued by Falkenhayn. Whereas Falkenhayn was continuing Moltke’s (and Schlieffen’s) France-first strategy, Hindenburg wanted a Russia-first approach, to exploit the incorrigible inefficiencies of the tsarist empire. But with the Russian mobilization finally complete and Conrad retreating instead of advancing, Hindenburg’s Warsaw operation would be risky. Without an Austrian pincer from the south, the Germans would have to bludgeon their way alone through Russia’s fully mobilized strength.

  As they would throughout the war, the German commanders in the east, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, exceeded their orders and did what they wanted to do. Falkenhayn was preparing to hit the British with what he hoped would be a knockout blow in Flanders; he expected Hindenburg merely to shift German forces toward Cracow to bolster Conrad and hold the eastern line defensively, but Hindenburg opted for an offensive instead. He and Ludendorff argued that such an operation would threaten the Russian flank and rear and take far more pressure off Conrad than a flat-footed deployment in Silesia or Galicia.

  In the east, in other words, Hindenburg was aiming as doggedly at Warsaw as Falkenhayn was aiming at Calais in the west. Warsaw—a city of eight hundred thousand, with barracks, hospitals, magazines, and a belt of modern forts—was the third-largest city in Russia, the chief railway hub of Poland, and the natural headquarters of the Russian army. Its loss would force the Russians to pull back their entire front and relocate general headquarters to some peripheral place like Vilna or Bialystok. Calais would be the springboard to conquer England, Warsaw the springboard into Russia.16

  Wedged in between the Vistula and the Carpathians, Conrad had painted himself into his own peripheral place. He was fortunate that his pell-mell retreat had taken him so far so fast that the Russians had outrun their own radius of supply and could not finish him off. As Churchill would put it, “In the West the armies were too big for the country; in the East the country was too big for the armies.”17 A Russian officer noted that the Austrians and Russians had marched so fast—the Austrians in retreat and the Russians in pursuit—that it took a long time for the Russian supply trains to catch up; some days his unit would go from daybreak until ten at night without a crumb to eat. Even when food arrived—some army bread, a slaughtered ox—he found it hard to eat: “I’ve become a vegetarian; they slaughter these cows to feed us; there are guts, organs, stomachs and eyes lying everywhere, dark pools of animal blood, sometimes the bawling beast will run right past you, its throat already slit, and then fall down beside you, bleeding and kicking the air.”18

  Ludendorff’s idea was to exploit these Russian difficulties. Engaged in stripping the German Eighth Army to create the Ninth Army at Breslau (Wroclaw), Ludendorff asked Conrad to chip in Dankl’s First Army for a renewed offensive. When Conrad hesitated—viewing every request from the Germans as a personal affront—Hindenburg reminded him that only the offensive could overcome worsening odds on every front: “a greater success will be achieved through envelopment,” not passive defense, he coached Conrad on September 22. Privately, German headquarters scorned this Austrian passivity, Colonel Max Hoffmann writing in his diary: “Everything is fine here except for the Austrians. If only the brutes would move!”19

  This time the brutes were willing. Conrad judged this his last opportunity to envelop the Russians in the Polish “tongue.” With this infusion of German troops, Berlin and Vienna would muster nearly eighty infantry divisions in the east, against eighty-five Russian divisions. Beset by organizational problems and the need to detach armies to the Baltic and Black Sea coasts as well as to the Caucasus to fight the Turks, the Russians would not achieve an overwhelming superiority in manpower on the Eastern Front until the middle of 1916. It had been precisely this Russian sluggishness that had given hope to proponents of the Schlieffen Plan. The Russians were also feeling the loss of thousands of regimental officers and NCOs in the battles of August and September; their places now had to be filled by new recruits, who lacked experience and conditioning.20 Austria-Hungary, in other words, still had a chance to win in the east, if it acted quickly and dec
isively in concert with the Germans.

  Conrad scraped together his last intact forces—“the last man, the last artillery piece, the last machine gun.” For once he was not exaggerating; with a paltry annual production run of just 150,000 rifles, the monarchy was running out of them, so many troops having surrendered theirs to the Russians or Serbs. Field artillery regiments found themselves with more crews than guns because so many cannon had been abandoned to the Russians.21

  Conrad naturally believed that he, not Hindenburg, should command all allied German and Austrian formations in the east. “Why,” Conrad raged to Bolfras, “is the German Ninth Army reporting to its own great headquarters in Mézières instead of to [me]?” Having once favored cooperation with the Germans, Conrad now resented being pulled north: “Why are we being asked to give up operations on the San to help the Germans at Warsaw?” But by now Bolfras was only too willing to subordinate Conrad to Hindenburg, or even to replace Conrad with an entirely new AOK: Archduke Friedrich perhaps, with Ludendorff as his all-powerful staff chief.22

  Ludendorff, like Hindenburg, was a force to be reckoned with. By reducing the Eighth Army to just two corps, Ludendorff was able to mass the new Ninth Army with four corps, a reserve division, and a cavalry division around Kattowitz (Katowice) in Silesia. Before the war, Ludendorff had emerged as a ruthless department head inside the German general staff, taking over much of Moltke’s work and acquiring little fear of Falkenhayn, who, as war minister, had represented a more moderate and reasonable faction than Ludendorff’s.23 By now Ludendorff was working at cross-purposes with the kaiser and Falkenhayn’s Oberste Heeresleitung (OHL) in France. OHL, the German supreme command, wanted merely to hold in the east while striking decisively in the west, forcing Hindenburg to telegraph the kaiser regular threats of resignation to wring more independence (and troops) from Falkenhayn, who felt that every premature detachment of troops to the east would doom his efforts in the west.

  Now a Generaloberst—a virtual field marshal—Hindenburg could not really be ordered around by anyone anyway. Conrad chafed at the politics involved in every decision by this “marvelous triangle” of the Eastern Front: himself, Ludendorff, and Falkenhayn. Colonel Max Hoffmann noted the tension: “When one gets a close view of influential people—their bad relations with each other, their conflicting ambitions—one must always bear in mind that it is certainly worse on the other side among the French, English and Russians, or one might well be nervous.”24

  It was certainly worse on the Russian side. After his halting conquest of Lemberg, Ruzski had been rewarded with command of the Northwest Front, where he replaced Zhilinsky, who had been disgraced by defeats at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes. But instead of taking the fight to Hindenburg, Ruzski took it to Ivanov, his former boss on the Southwest Front. Ivanov wanted to exploit the collapse of the Austrians and press on to Cracow and Budapest. Ruzski slammed on the brakes, insisting that no offensives be undertaken and that reserves instead be collected to defeat the gathering German thrust through Warsaw to the Russian interior. Taking stock of his poor communications, Ruzski even mooted a “strategic retreat” to the Niemen. He pondered abandoning Warsaw, that great road hub and strategic prize, and pulling back to Kovno.

  Were Ruzski to withdraw as threatened, Ivanov would have to go back too, yielding even Lemberg to guard his flank. With all of its reserves already apportioned by Sukhomlinov, the Stavka found itself with little ability to impose a single direction, or even move units around in the true spirit of a “general headquarters.” East Prussia absorbed twenty-five Russian divisions and Galicia another thirty, leaving just thirty divisions for the central offensive demanded by the tsar and the western allies. Grand Duke Nikolai expressed “fright” at the pessimism and querulousness of his generals, but he had few levers to move them. The commanders on each operational front controlled a vast hinterland as well as rails and rolling stock, and they had become adept at rebuffing the Stavka’s calls for cooperation with unanswerable logistical counterarguments.25

  It took the Germans finally to move the Russians. On September 28, General August von Mackensen’s Ninth Army began marching to the Vistula along roads so muddy that the carts and troops were forced to stumble through the plowland on either side. The officers marveled at the “lack of middle-class culture” in Polish towns, a shabbiness of architecture, display, and street life that was, as one German put it, “as frightful as the American West.”26 Ludendorff, who had pressed hard for this autumn offensive, had not expected conditions to be so bad so soon. He described the mud in Poland as “knee-deep,” even on the great Cracow-to-Warsaw post road. Guns and carts sank up to their axles and had to be heaved forward by wet, tired troops. Officers recalled Napoleon’s observation a century earlier, when he had come this way: “God has created a fifth element in addition to water, air, earth and fire: mud.”27

  Like Napoleon, the Germans had soaring plans. In an uneasy compromise between the France-first and Russia-first strategies, Hindenburg and Ludendorff were preparing for an intensive “second war” with the Russians once—as Hoffmann put it—“France was crossed off the list of great powers.” On this campaign, Hindenburg brought along the king of Saxony—a prince of the German Empire—to be installed in Warsaw as “king of Poland” once the Russians had been driven out.28 Lieutenant Harry Kessler, marching with the German Ninth Army, mused about victory: Russia would be beaten and Poland detached as a self-governing German dominion “along the model of Canada or Australia.”29

  A British officer marching with the Russians noted that they suffered even more than the oncoming Germans; “so defective was the state of the roads” that his unit required nine days to traverse 120 miles. Another foreign attaché, serving with the Russians at Lublin, described roads there “broken up by heavy artillery and pontoons, and covered with several inches of liquid mud.”30 Sukhomlinov’s war ministry had made even less provision for the foul weather than Ludendorff or Conrad, and so these Russian troops shivered in their sodden summer uniforms and squelched through the mud barefoot or in sodden hemp clogs. On October 5, the only marginally better-shod Austrian Fourth, Third, and Second Armies crossed the Viskola and the thirteen divisions (one hundred thousand men) of the First Army closed up wing to wing with the German Ninth Army at Opatów. One of those Germans was unimpressed: “The Austrians make a clueless and disorganized impression. Many do not understand German. . . . In general, even the Russian prisoners make more of a military impression than these Austrian tramp soldiers, who arrive everywhere too late.”31

  The Austrians relieved the town and fortress of Przemysl on October 9. Like MacArthur in the Philippines, Conrad had vowed to return, and he had. Some of Boroevic’s troops cleared fifteen thousand Russian and Austrian corpses from the fortress’ perimeter, while the rest joined the Second Army’s pursuit of the retreating Russians toward Lemberg. But their pursuit shortly slowed and then stopped altogether. Like the September battles in reverse, the Russians withdrew from river line to river line, shooting up every Austrian attempt to pursue them. Unlike the Russians in September, the Austrians lacked the manpower to go around the Russians, so they attacked frontally, with the usual result. “The battle today,” General Otto Meixner wrote on October 12, “was indecisive; none of my groups could push through.” On the thirteenth: “It appears that we’re no longer dealing with rear-guards, but with strong enemy forces.” On the seventeenth: “This morning we began our attack as ordered. It quickly broke down under heavy fire from the flank. We slept in the same position we woke in.”

  The Russian retreat had stopped and they had settled into the very Grodek position the Austrians had yielded in September. Getting shot by Russians sheltering in the same position in which they had so recently sheltered to shoot Russians must have been deflating, even more so because the Austrians were attacking without artillery support. On October 21, Meixner expressed his consternation: “General Colerus has ordered that due to the shortage of shells, attacks must only be
attempted where success can be anticipated without artillery support.”32 That was nowhere on this front.

  Dankl’s First Army followed the Vistula northeast in the same half-hearted fashion, crossing to the left bank and making for Sandomir. The Austrians marched until they met resistance, then halted. Although the Austrians had broken the Russian codes and the Germans had discovered the complete Russian order of battle on the corpse of an officer on October 9 (revealing three Russian armies, the center of the Russian phalanx, concentrating behind the Vistula), Conrad lacked the strength to exploit the intelligence. For their part, the Russians sought ways to get at the Germans and exploit Austria’s infirmity. They needed to do something lest they yield more of Poland to the German advance and expose the flank and rear of Ivanov’s Southwest Front in Galicia. If that happened, the whole Russian army would have to retreat, permitting the Austrians to retake Lemberg and the Germans to take Warsaw while finishing off the French and British in the west.

  The guiding concept now in Russian headquarters was that the Austro-Hungarians were weak and could be held in check by a small force while the bulk of the Russian army turned to attack the Germans. Brusilov was entrusted with the smaller force: the Third and Eighth Armies as well as a newly formed Eleventh Army. Ivanov took the Second Army from Ruzski’s front and added it to his command of the Fourth, Ninth, and Fifth Armies. Crossing back over the Vistula, Ivanov marched north; by mid-October, the First, Second, and Fifth Armies were massing around Warsaw, the Fourth around Ivangorod (Deblin), and the Ninth at Sandomir. Sixty Russian divisions faced eighteen German ones. Hindenburg later applauded it as the “grand duke’s greatest plan”: count on Austrian passivity, lure the Germans toward Warsaw, and then envelop Mackensen’s overeager Ninth Army from the flanks.33