A Mad Catastrophe

by Geoffrey Wawro

  The grand duke’s plan was fine on paper, but all of the Russian armies were dogged by crippling shortages. With their ports on the Baltic and Black Sea closed by German and Turkish blockades, the Russians had to rely on imports from Archangel (two thousand miles from the front and iced over for half the year) and Vladivostock (eight thousand miles away). It took Russian ports a full year to accumulate as many ship arrivals (1,250) as British ports handled every four days, which certainly gave a glimpse of the tsar’s supply problem. The grand duke and Ivanov pleaded for a suspension of operations until shell stocks could be replenished, but the tsar and Sukhomlinov, pressured by the French, drove the generals forward, the desperate Russian gunners improvising shells out of ration cans, gas pipes, and scrap metal.34

  On October 10, the Russians began to cross the Vistula to attack. While the German Ninth Army came under attack at Warsaw, the Austrians were pummeled on the San and south of Przemysl by the Russian Third and Eighth Armies. From October 13 until early November, this Battle of the San raged along the Polish-Ukrainian borderland. Archduke Joseph Ferdinand, who had replaced Auffenberg in command of the Fourth Army, alternated excuses (“for more than three months we have been fighting a Russian force twice our size”) with exhortations (“find those sectors where we can fight the enemy on equal terms”) and strategic nonsense (“only the strong can waste time; the weak must save it”).35 Nothing worked, and the three hundred thousand men of the Austrian Second, Third, and Fourth Armies were roundly beaten again.

  Boroevic had to deploy machine guns to stem the rout of his Third Army on the San; one of his regiments, the largely Hungarian 34th, was depleted by mass suicides, as the exhausted men killed themselves rather than soldier on.36 The Third Army had been Boroevic’s for two months, yet he was still lamenting the things he had observed in September: “too many men are walking away from the battle line, and no one stops them.” His 44th Landwehr Division retreated, leaving hundreds of precious rifles neatly stacked for the pursuing Russians. “Those rifles were taken from our wounded per regulations,” Boroevic raged, “and no one thought to transport them to safety?”37

  The Germans had misread Russian intentions and were forced to retreat from Warsaw, a decision announced on October 18. Having agreed earlier to the loan of Dankl to cover Mackensen’s right, Conrad was now compelled to use Dankl’s First Army to cover the retreat, advancing the First Army to attack the flank of the Russian Fourth and Ninth Armies as they crossed the Vistula. In the last week of October, the Austro-Hungarian First Army was badly beaten opposite Ivangorod, the great moated citadel fifty miles south of Warsaw. Supply was abysmal—the Austrians had not seen their field kitchens for days, and the scrawny wheelhorses were dying in their traces. An Austrian staff officer, asked to report on the condition of the 37th Honvéd Division during the battle, reported thus: “Severely exhausted by days of round-the-clock marching and fighting, the troops can only be driven forward with acts of violence; even the officers are broken men.”38 A battle opened to cover the German retreat was then converted by Hindenburg into an opportunistic offensive to lure the Russians after Mackensen, then cross the Vistula with the main German body and hit them in the flanks. But Dankl, seeking validation after his dispiriting retreat from Krásnik, opened up his own defenses to tempt the Russians over the Vistula and enclose them. He let them across but failed to enclose them, which had the effect of surrounding the surrounders, now from both flanks—Ruzski from the north, Evert from the south. Hindenburg resumed his retreat, damning the Austrians as he went. They couldn’t seem to do anything right.

  Pursued by the Russian Fourth and Ninth Armies, Dankl retreated all the way back to Cracow, then on to the Nida River, where he rested in the crook behind Hindenburg’s right flank. His army, like Archduke Joseph Ferdinand’s Fourth, had dissolved. Accosting a leaderless band of Austro-Hungarian troops, a German officer was stunned by their fearless indifference. “Why are you straggling?” he demanded. “Are you footsore, exhausted?” No, they growled, glancing in the direction of the front, “but why should we let ourselves be shot to pieces up there?”39 The Austrian officer chronicling the decline of the 37th Honvéd Division described their behavior on the retreat: “Extreme demoralization—in Opatów, I found drunken men of this unit weaving through the streets; they had guzzled a cask of rum; the whole place was jammed with retreating wagons; a more depressing spectacle couldn’t be imagined.”

  Neighboring Austro-Hungarian divisions seethed with ethnic hatred for one another, further poisoning the already sickened Habsburg army. “The mistrust that has arisen between the adjoining troops of the 5th Division and the 33rd Division is based on the extremely heavy casualties suffered by a regiment of the 5th when a regiment of the 33rd surrendered en masse instead of covering the retreat of their comrades from an exposed position,” one of Dankl’s corps commanders explained to him on November 15. What he was really saying—still a taboo subject in the Habsburg army—was that Czechs and Germans had been slaughtered because Hungarians had surrendered to save themselves rather than fight to extricate their comrades. The event in question had occurred on October 26. On December 13, the pedantic Dankl was still entangled in it, even though it was the sort of depressingly ordinary donnybrook that happened every day everywhere on this front: “I remain confused as to what specific circumstances caused the unauthorized retreat of the [Hungarian] 26th Regiment,” he wrote the 5th Division commander, who was advocating on behalf of the Czechs and Germans of the 93rd. “Your attachments do not clarify the matter. Go back over this event and document it thoroughly in writing, so that we can determine whether actions were indeed taken that did not correspond to the ‘no retreat’ order in force at the time.”40

  Hindenburg was also litigating, against Conrad’s impetuosity; by now relations between the two headquarters were so sour that the German referred to the Austrian as “that man,” as in “that man hit the Russians too soon, when they were only partially across the Vistula instead of waiting for the main body to cross.”41 They hated the sound of each other’s voices—Conrad’s warbling Viennese accent contrasted with Hindenburg’s “Berlin Guardsman’s tone” (Berliner Gardeton) that delivered pronouncements with the clipped officiousness (Schnoddrigkeit) that made every Austrian—Conrad most of all—feel small.

  The Austrians by now were so weak that they could not even parry a fragment of the Russian army. Conrad begged Falkenhayn for more and more German troops. One day Falkenhayn took his Austro-Hungarian military liaison aside and said, “General Conrad has written me a letter in which he says that thirty new divisions are necessary for the Eastern Front. . . . I’m sure he’s right and I concur, but, tell me, where shall I find those divisions?”42 Once more, however, the quarreling Austrians and Germans were spared by Russian hesitation. After Warsaw, the Stavka could not decide whether to emphasize the southern, central, or northern fronts, so they promoted all three. “Frankly speaking,” Ivanov grumbled, “it’s impossible to detect in the Stavka’s instructions either an exact task or a fixed objective.”43

  On the Austrian front, the Russians crossed the San in the night of October 18. This meant that Przemysl, which had been briefly relieved on October 9, would have to be either abandoned or shut up for another siege. His reputation already in tatters, Conrad did not dare abandon the fortress, and so for a week trains rumbled into Przemysl every fourteen minutes unloading supplies for a six-month siege and carrying out the fifteen thousand men who had been wounded in the struggle for the town. A Russian on Przemysl’s war-torn perimeter was struck by the squalor of his first siege: “The images are very depressing; corpses to left and right, ours and theirs, some fresh, some many days old. . . . Most memorable are the skulls, the hair, the fingernails and the hands of the dead. Here and there feet poke out of the ground, from corpses that were not buried deep enough. The heavy wheels of our battery make cracking noises as we roll over them. We saw an Austrian who had been buried alive; he’d come to, freed himself, an
d then died. He lay there lifeless, his head and hands above the ground, the rest below. My God, how long can you see such things before you lose your mind?”44

  Spared these horrors, Conrad still seemed to have lost his mind. His management of the defense was appallingly slipshod. With everything collapsing, Przemysl was either a bridge too far—beyond the means of Austria to defend—or an indispensable symbol of Austro-Hungarian resistance to the Russian steamroller. If he held it as the latter, Conrad needed to evacuate the civilian population of thirty thousand and reduce the garrison to the bare minimum of about fifty thousand troops needed to hold the town and its detached forts so that the Russians would be unable to starve them out. He took none of these precautions. The civilian population remained, along with 135,000 troops, leaving a bloated, largely useless, and voracious population that the Russians could simply surround and leave to starve. No one believed that a Habsburg relief army would arrive in time, or at all. “The Austrians are thought to have sixteen regular and five reserve corps left in the field,” the British military attaché jotted from Warsaw, “but they are mere skeletons. The Russians have taken 1,000 guns and 200,000 prisoners. Are the Austrians beaten?”45

  Since the late summer defeats at Lemberg and Rawa-Ruska, Conrad’s war had swirled sluggishly around the basin between the San and the Carpathians. Forced behind the San in September, Conrad spent most of October—to Germany’s amazement—trying to cross back over it in order to make his army in some way effective. But the Russians, having failed to envelop Conrad before he reached the safety of the San, now turned the tables and used the river barrier to prevent the Austrians from cooperating with German operations around Warsaw. In a depressing sequence of skirmishes along the river—the San battles or Sankämpfe—the Austrians struggled to get back into Poland and the Russians struggled to keep them out.46

  In the three-day Battle of Opatowka in early November, Dankl’s First Army lost another forty thousand troops and pulled back behind the Nida. Conrad now gave back everything that had been (briefly) retaken. As most of the Austrians regrouped behind the next river barrier—the Dunajec-Nida position just east of the Cracow forts—Conrad’s North Army increasingly resembled a rabble. General Karl Lukas, who had experienced problems with the Czechs of his 19th Division in July, was overwhelmed by them in October. In a line that might have been penned by the sniggering Svejk, he implored: “Viribus Unitis! With United Forces! Let’s just do our best and give everything we’ve got, life and blood, for our beloved emperor.”47

  Conrad gaped at his casualties and the spiraling cost of the war, noting that just a few months of combat operations had cost the empire four billion crowns, the equivalent of seven years of prewar military spending. Yet despite these expenditures, Austro-Hungarian shell production remained embarrassingly feeble, even by 1914 standards. The monarchy produced just 116,000 shells in December 1914 for an artillery establishment that was firing off 240,000 rounds every week. Only regular deliveries of German shells kept them going.48 Conrad instructed his army commanders to compile “feats of arms” that could be mashed into propaganda and used “to inspire the war-lusty youth of the monarchy,” but there were no feats of arms to describe. The Kampfschilderungen (battle stories) requested would only serve to demoralize Austria’s youth.49

  The Austrians took some bittersweet consolation from the German retreat. Their ambassador in Berlin groused that Hindenburg’s “wreath of glories” remained weirdly intact despite the retreat from Warsaw back to German territory, and despite German contingency plans to blow up the Silesian coal mines if the Russian pursuit continued.50 It wouldn’t, and the Germans knew it. Unlike the Austrians, the Germans had a realistic sense of their own capabilities and those of the enemy. Ludendorff had calculated that a German retreat of seventy-five or a hundred miles—demolishing all (Russian) railways, roads and bridges along the way—would suffice to save his army and stop the Russians. And indeed, without rails beyond the Vistula, the Russian advance did peter out after just three days, an observer noting that “the Germans were retreating in that leisurely way which indicated that their retirement was anything but a rout.”51 Hoffmann, who had served as an observer in the Russo-Japanese War and still relished the anecdote about Generals Samsonov and Rennenkampf quarreling and punching each other on the railway platform at Mukden, had predicted a similar Russian breakdown in his war diary: “Nothing can go wrong; if we have to retreat, the Russians can only follow us for three days.”52

  By November 1, the Russian pursuit had stopped. The Germans, using the military railway that ran the entire length of their border with Russia, were able quickly to reinforce every threatened point. Unlike the Austrians, the Germans had perfected this kind of speedy deployment. “At every station as you approach the frontier,” the British travel writer Henry Norman had observed before the war, “the lines expand into a dozen, each alongside a platform, obviously that trains may be filled and emptied quickly to hurl the military might of Germany northward.” Cash to fill those trains with soldiers and shell and prolong the war flowed in from occupied territories such as Belgium, where the Germans levied a monthly “war contribution” of 40 million marks to defray a war bill that was mounting to 1.25 billion marks a month.53

  But there was no disguising the fact that even with heavier German participation, the Russians had parried the swipe at Warsaw (the “Calais of the east”) and survived another round. The Central Powers found themselves back where they had begun the operation a month earlier. By now, the two governments were hardly speaking, Austria’s minister in Dresden noting that he was being told nothing by German military authorities and was reduced to “loitering in the train stations to observe the passage of troop trains from east to west,” which, from the Austro-Hungarian perspective, was entirely the wrong direction.54

  On November 1, the kaiser formally appointed Hindenburg commander of all German forces in the east. Ludendorff was chief of staff to this new Ober-Ost command at Posen (Poznan) and Hoffmann chief of operations. “All German forces in the east” comprised two armies: Mackensen’s Ninth Army and Prince Leopold of Bavaria’s Eighth. They were embroiled in a strategic debate with Falkenhayn and the kaiser, a debate that would not be resolved until Falkenhayn’s dismissal and replacement by Hindenburg in August 1916. Falkenhayn had no appetite for Russian operations. He was committed to the battle at Ypres, which offered a great strategic prize—the Channel ports—if carried through to victory. If the Germans gained control of these ports, they could directly pressure Great Britain with U-boats and surface ships. That might compel the British to negotiate and withdraw their wealth, industry, and navy from the war, permitting the Germans to fight the French and Russians on more equal terms.

  In November 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm II (c.) appointed Hindenburg (l.) and Ludendorff (r.) to command all German forces in the east from a new headquarters (Ober-Ost) in Posen. The two generals battled with Falkenhayn for resources and influence, seeking to decide the Great War in the east, not the west.

  Credit: National Archives

  Falkenhayn considered it foolhardy to focus on the Russians. The tsar had only to enlist “General Winter” and retreat away from the Germans to buy time for yet another attritional campaign while the British busily expanded their army and navy and Italy—in all probability—entered the war on the side of the Entente. Thus, Falkenhayn refused all reinforcements to Hindenburg and counseled him instead to hold a winter line in the east while Falkenhayn carried through to victory his operations in Belgium. Falkenhayn even pondered a separate peace with the Russians to facilitate concentration against France and Britain.55

  Ludendorff continued to assert that he could win the war in the east, even as Falkenhayn doubled down for the Ypres offensive, which he launched on November 4.56 The six corps that Hindenburg had been expecting were instead committed to Falkenhayn’s “race to the sea,” which left Ober-Ost and the Austrians with a total of just 75 divisions against 135 Russian divisions. Undeterred,
Ludendorff reconcentrated the Ninth Army at Thorn (Torun). He and Hindenburg gave Falkenhayn’s apparently sacrosanct France-first strategy a novel twist. They (grudgingly) agreed that France and Britain would remain the focus of German efforts, but added that the defeat of the British Expeditionary Force and Kitchener’s call for “new armies” in Britain after the devastating casualties of the summer and fall offered a one-time opportunity: to finish the war in the east in the winter of 1914 and then transfer all German (and Austrian) fighting strength to the west in the spring of 1915 before the new British divisions were available. In just a matter of weeks, with relatively light forces, Ludendorff and Hindenburg had managed to stop the Russian steamroller in its tracks. They now intended to finish it off.

  chapter12

  The Thin Gray Line

  Ludendorff had no intention of losing. With the Russian Second and Fifth Armies resuming their weary march on Germany, Ober-Ost planned to reprise the Tannenberg feat with a similar stroke: move rapidly onto the flank of the Second Army—already Ludendorff’s victim once at Tannenberg—smash it in again, and then drive southeast to the city of Lodz with Mackensen’s Ninth Army. Lodz was the only place with good roads, railways, and quarters in a region otherwise bereft of billets and communications. It was a strategic keypoint for both sides, and Hindenburg planned to bring forty-two Austro-German divisions against forty-nine Russian divisions to seize the city and use it as an eventual springboard for a new eastern offensive.

  Ludendorff imagined that victory at Lodz would decisively open the door to Warsaw. Based there, the Germans and Austrians might finish off Russia and—as an Austrian diplomat put it—“redraw the borders of northeastern Europe.” Everyone was confident enough to begin speculating on what to do with the Russian carcass. Bethmann spoke of a “liberated Ukraine”—presumably liberated just long enough to be subjected to Germany or Austria. Vienna and Berlin angled for Poland, and the Germans assumed that they’d receive Russia’s Baltic provinces and Finland as well. Poland was the knottiest issue; neither the Germans nor the Austrians really wanted it, for it contained too many Poles, who would merely weaken future governments in Berlin or Vienna with their nationalist demands. Yet Poland could not be left to the Russians, who needed to be maximally weakened and pushed away from the German and Austrian borders; nor could it be given its independence, lest it become a great power in its own right or a French satellite. With the war far from decided, this “Polish question” still lay some distance down the road.1 But that distance was closing, and the Polish roads rising to meet the Germans now would not be blocked by snow until December, and they’d freeze in mid-November, facilitating fast German marches and preventing the Russians from entrenching. If the Germans could strike quickly into the heart of Poland, they might be able to catch the Russians in the field and deal them a crushing military defeat before the year was out.