A Mad Catastrophe

by Geoffrey Wawro

  Using eight hundred trains, Mackensen shuttled the Ninth Army north to Thorn. Then on November 11 he wheeled southeast and, covering his left with the Vistula, struck toward the Russian flank between Lodz and Warsaw. In just five days, he had moved a quarter of a million troops onto the Russian flank in complete secrecy. This, as the British attaché with the Russians put it, was “a masterpiece of organization,” launched just fifteen days after the German retreat from Warsaw.2 Back in the Dresden train station, where he had earlier complained of the east-west flow of German troops, Austria’s minister confirmed that “troop trains are now moving west to east.”3

  This eastward movement of German troops, meanwhile, was reshaping events in the western theater. Having failed to win the “race to the sea” to outflank the British in Flanders, Falkenhayn grimly settled down to a war of attrition on the Western Front. He fortified his trench line in Belgium and France and released three infantry corps to Hindenburg. A British observer with the Russians judged the German troop movements “amazing—some of the men [the Russians] took prisoner, their entire corps and divisions, had been rushed up from Belgium, back again, sent into Austria, and then brought back to East Prussia.”4

  This ability to shift nimbly on interior lines between the two fronts gave the Germans the chance to execute Hindenburg’s favored strategy: defend in the west and win in the east. To land that winning blow, Berlin dug deep for new sources of men (forty-five- to fifty-year-olds were conscripted for the first time) and money. The Reichstag voted a second round of war credits in November. Thus bolstered, Hindenburg built his Eastern Army or Ostheer to a strength of twelve corps (with six more promised) and seven cavalry divisions. Conrad, his fortunes and importance sinking by the day, watched jealously from the sidelines, his only comment “Vederemo—we’ll see.”5

  Most striking about the German forces arriving from the west was their state of mind; having been exposed to more fire than the easterners, they exhibited more psychoses. One German officer in the Carpathians noted that of ten men sent to his unit from France, three suffered nervous breakdowns. One would sit for hours staring at the ground and reciting long passages from The Odyssey in Greek.6 But it was still early days in the war, and these shell-shocked men accounted for only a fraction of the overall troop strength in the east.

  With the ground hardened by frost, those Germans of sounder mind marched quickly, covering fifty miles in four days, and smashed the lone corps of the Russian First Army on the south bank of the Vistula. The Germans then thrust into the gap between the First and Second Armies and pushed the four corps of General Sergei Scheidemann’s Second Army back on Lodz, a city of 500,000, on November 18. As the Russian First Army reeled back toward Warsaw, Ludendorff gathered in 136,000 prisoners and prepared to envelop the Second Army. His analysts estimated that the Germans and Austrians together had killed, wounded, or captured 1.25 million Russians since the start of the war, and that even the Russian steamroller could not absorb losses like these forever.

  By November 1914, the Germans calculated that they and the Austrians had killed, wounded, or captured 1.25 million Russians in just three months of combat. Russian prisoners, like these, lacked everything: rifles, ammunition, food, and any notion as to what the war was about.

  Credit: Heeresgeschichtliches Museum, Wien

  Evidence from the battlefront seemed to justify German optimism. Captured Russians confirmed that they had neither food nor ammunition; their orders were to attack unarmed and pick up rifles from the dead and wounded. Wounded Russians were instructed not just to await first aid but to look around for an unarmed comrade and offer him their rifle. This predicament partially explained the German drive for war in 1914: the Russian Great Army Program of 1913 was not projected to fill the rifle gap in the Russian army until 1918, and this gap and many others had clearly not even been narrowed in the first year of the program.7 For the duration of the war, 35 percent of the men in an average Russian infantry division would have no rifle at all; German officers chuckled that the Russians were so short of artillery that they were begging the Japanese to return the guns lost in the Manchurian War. The Russians were also trying to buy rifles and ammunition in Japan, and were offering five rubles to peasants who would bring any rifle—German, Austrian, or Russian—to a Russian unit.8

  The Russian artillery had fired an average of forty-five thousand shells a day for the first hundred days of the war, and the ammunition shortage was so severe that Russian officers were now being told to “push the troops forward and pull the munitions back,” which was not good news for the troops. The Russians were estimated to be down to a million shells or less, and they had only a single munitions factory (Britain had 150) and could not easily import new factories because the French and British had already claimed all American exports; even if the machines were shipped to the faraway Russian ports, they could not be installed anywhere near the fighting fronts.9 Sensing victory—so welcome after the stalemate in the west—Kaiser Wilhelm II departed for a ten-day visit to the Russian front. The German generals now spoke excitedly of a war-winning Zug nach Osten, or drive to the east.10

  Ruzski, who was in command of the Northwest Front, finally understood on November 15 what was happening. Mackensen’s move was not a feint; it was the main effort, and it was aimed at Lodz, the heart of the empire’s textile industry and a key winter-billeting area on the road to Warsaw. Ruzski had left only a corps of Rennenkampf’s First Army around Lodz, directing the rest of it to advance into East Prussia. He now ordered Rennenkampf back, to join the battle at Lodz. Ruzski ordered Evert to continue advancing west with the Fourth Army to engage any Austrians who came forward and divert any German reinforcements, then swung his Second and Fifth Armies around to face north. He boldly directed his First Army to drop down and encircle Mackensen.

  Plehve, commanding the Russian Fifth Army, had already extricated himself from Auffenberg’s trap at Komarów, and now wriggled clear of Mackensen’s. Sixty-five years old—the same age as Mackensen—Plehve was a born commander, a witness in his headquarters recalling that he “grasped the situation with extraordinary quickness and gave his decision rapidly and firmly.”11 Countermarching seventy miles in three days over frozen roads, Plehve’s Fifth Army beat Mackensen to Lodz, and then attacked the right wing of the attempted German envelopment.12 Rennenkampf’s emboldened First Army approached the German left at Lowitsch (Lowicz). Mackensen arrived outside Lodz to find seven Russian corps already there. Suddenly the German was in danger of being encircled by a Russian force twice the size of his own. Sensing a decisive battle, Grand Duke Nikolai moved the Stavka from Baranovichi to Skierniewice, a village east of Lodz.

  General August von Mackensen had fought in the Franco-Prussian War and served as Wilhelm II’s military history tutor. Reputed to be the best horseman in the German army—hence the hussar tunic—Mackensen had vied with the Younger Moltke for the job of general staff chief in 1906 and was a natural choice to command the German Ninth Army in the east in 1914.

  Credit: National Archives

  As at Warsaw, Ludendorff had gambled and lost. Russian plans had been so muddled, first forward, then back, that he had assumed that their latest movement back on Lodz heralded a panicky retreat across the Vistula, not a grim determination to hold the line. Like Mackensen, Ludendorff gobbled the bait and rushed headlong into the trap being laid by Ruzski. Where the fighting was heaviest, north and west of Lodz, the Russians outnumbered the Germans; being so close to the city’s supplies, they also had sufficient ammunition for once, while the Germans, at the end of long supply lines, were running short. Valued less than ammunition, Russian wounded were left to die and rot. Mikhail Rodzyanko, the president of the Duma, debarked near the front and saw seventeen thousand wounded Russians sprawled in the cold mud. Most of them had been there for five days, and no one had even dressed their festering wounds.13

  While they grappled with Plehve, the Germans were also eavesdropping on Russian radio transmissions, a
s they had been doing every day since Tannenberg. They charted Rennenkampf’s slow progress toward Lodz and knew that whatever advantage they still enjoyed was slipping away. Mackensen gambled that he still had time to send General Reinhard von Scheffer’s reserve corps—fifty-five thousand Germans in six divisions—east of the city to close the ring around the two Russian armies that were there. The Austrians were supposed to have done this; Conrad had ordered the Fourth Army to sally from behind the Wisloka (where it had crept from the Dunajec), attack from the south, and “complete the catastrophe of the Russian armed forces in Poland,” but it hadn’t. Fighting to cross the Vistula, the Austrians were stopped cold by the Russians, who had one army on their right (Third) and another on their left (Ninth), a by-now familiar predicament for Archduke Joseph Ferdinand’s Fourth Army. Attacking across pontoon bridges into Russian shrapnel and machine guns, the troops experienced casualties so high that some Fourth Army divisions had to be renamed brigades. Drummers and musicians were converted to riflemen. The conversion was explained thus: “Because we just don’t need music anymore.”14

  Shadowing the Austrian retreat on November 20, a Russian lieutenant named Fedor Stepun noted the squalor and dashed hopes the Austrians left in their wake. Stepun was reminded of old Marshal Kutuzov, who had fought Napoleon to a draw at Borodino and explained looting and atrocities in war this way: “Whenever you cut down a tree, sawdust flies.” Now Stepun arrived amid all the sawdust of war. “We entered a town the beaten enemy troops had just left. What a picture of misery. . . . The streets and train station were filled with civilians who had tried and failed to get away with their property. Five trains were stuck in the station; personal belongings were piled on the platforms and crammed into every railroad car: beds, couches, mattresses, toys, paintings, albums, women’s clothing, hats, Jewish prayer books, lamps, coffee, a meat grinder.”

  Cossacks on horseback—each of them trailing an extra horse or two liberated from the locals—picked through the heaped-up chattels; some dismounted to replace their worn saddles and blankets with sofa cushions and tablecloths. “Here’s the difference between soldiers and Cossacks,” the Russian officer observed. “The soldier will take what he needs; he has pangs of conscience. The Cossack has none; he takes everything, the necessary and the unnecessary alike.” Across the street, the Roman Catholic church had been looted: urine, vomit, and excrement streaked the walls, the Latin Bible lay on the floor, and two dead Austrian soldiers sprawled in the entrance, one young and handsome, the other old and ugly. “Their pockets, as is the case with every dead soldier, had been turned inside out; everybody here is greedy for gold.”15

  Cossacks dancing in camp. “Here’s the difference between soldiers and Cossacks,” a Russian officer observed. “The soldier will take what he needs; he has pangs of conscience. The Cossack has none; he takes everything, the necessary and the unnecessary alike.”

  Credit: Heeresgeschichtliches Museum, Wien

  Little of this misery penetrated the sheltered leadership of the Habsburg state. Far to the west, General Stürgkh was spending a raw November day touring the 1870 battlefields of Gravelotte and St. Privat with Tisza. As they poked around the tidy French villages, assembling their knowledge of the Franco-Prussian War, Tisza said: “To this day, I am still wondering who ordered the offensive in August against Serbia. Once war with Russia became unavoidable, all offensives against Serbia were to have been shelved. How it is that we went ahead and invaded Serbia remains a big hole in my knowledge. I am convinced,” Tisza concluded, “that we would not have lost the Battle of Lemberg had Conrad only sent Second Army promptly to the east.”16

  Lemberg, of course, was ancient history to the Austro-Hungarian troops in the east, who were reeling back toward Cracow, “retreating west again on roads we had come to know so well,” one Jäger officer jeered. Desertion spiked, and the Fourth Army ordered an investigation into the disappearance into Russian captivity of two entire regiments totaling eight thousand men along with their colonels and officers on November 25. Inside Cracow, the Fourth Army went on a thieving rampage, the fortress commandant forming a civil guard “to protect private property from the assaults, vandalism, and burglary” practiced by Austria’s own troops. In the Austrian countryside, peasants quickly learned to fear the approach of the emperor’s army. Unit reports echoed with incidents of robbery, extortion, and beatings. On December 1, General Dankl vowed to punish the “escalating cases of plunder by our own troops against our own people,” a vow that would be difficult to enforce in this atmosphere of chronic defeat and retreat.17

  The Austrian Nordstoss of August had given way to the Great Retreat of September, then to the San Battles of October, and now settled into an even drearier Battle of Cracow. Several Russian armies closed around Conrad’s shrunken Austro-Hungarian force, which was supposed to be bravely thrusting forward to join forces with Mackensen’s Ninth Army at Lodz, but was instead huddling in its trenches 150 miles to the south. With the Austrians inert, Ruzski drifted over to threaten the Germans with catastrophe. Ludendorff had spoken grandly of a “second Sedan” at Lodz, with the Austrians and Germans encircling the Russian armies there, but Mackensen now grasped that he’d have to perform the feat alone. Although outnumbered in the long run, Mackensen still thought he could win in the short run if he could knock out the Russians before Rennenkampf arrived in force.

  The Russian Second Army certainly felt defeated. As General Reinhard von Scheffer’s fifty-five-thousand-man corps moved onto his flank, the Second Army’s new commander telegraphed Ruzski that he was surrounded, to which Ruzski, who was studying his maps, marvelously replied: “No, you’ve surrounded them, now demand their surrender.” Indeed he had. Marooned at Lowicz—midway between Lodz and Warsaw—Scheffer’s corps found itself with no connection to Mackensen and frantically began to backpedal. The ground was too hard for trenching, so soldiers on both sides fought in the open, slid into streambeds, or raked together tree limbs and sandbags for protection. These were easily blasted away by artillery and machine guns. Where old trenches coincided with the new lines of battle, they were occupied, but the frozen ground prevented wet from soaking away, so blood, feces, and urine accumulated in a sludge that never froze, making this winter war even more squalid than the campaigns of summer and fall.18 Walking along one of these foul trenches, an observer paused to record a grisly sight: “I came upon a raven perched upon the face of what had once been a man. It had picked his eyes from their sockets, and torn away his lips, and portions of the flesh of his face. It flapped off slowly, with a sullen croak.”19

  Ludendorff damned Conrad’s inaction. Had the Austro-Hungarian North Army advanced powerfully on the German right, Ludendorff believes, the Central Powers would have enveloped the Russians. Instead, the Russians were poised to envelop the Germans.20 An Austro-Hungarian officer attached to a German corps in France reported that “all people talk about here is Austria, and Hindenburg’s regular complaints about our lack of toughness. . . . They say German troops can march sixty kilometers when necessary; ours can’t make more than thirty; they say German troops can campaign without baggage; our troops can’t.”21 In German great headquarters, Stürgkh puzzled over the organic differences between Germans and Austrians: “The Austrian is forever confusing the personal and the professional; the German has eyes only for the professional and leaves the personal aside. To the Austrian, the form and manner in which a task is assigned is more important than the task itself, whereas the German looks only at the task. To the German, the Austrian lacks energy and substance.”22

  With the Austrians sitting on their hands and the Germans on the verge of a great defeat, Ruzski watched in frustration as the Germans escaped. Rennenkampf—disparaged since Tannenberg as “Rennen ohne Kampf,” or “Run without Fighting”—had run away again, this time closing too slowly from the north and permitting Scheffer to extricate his entire force (as well as ten thousand prisoners and sixty guns) from the Lowicz pocket. A Russian captain provided
an explanation for the unwarlike torpor: summoned urgently from Tilsit to trap the Germans, he force-marched his regiment sixty-five miles in three days to the nearest train station, where no train awaited. The men spent twenty-four hours on the platform without food, drink, or shelter from cold winds. When the War Ministry finally discovered them at Mittau (Jeglava) and sent a train, it took two entire days—still without the troops having a crumb to eat—to crawl along to Warsaw. There they entrained for Lodz, still without food, and arrived on the outskirts, detrained, and were sent into the trenches, without sleep or a meal. Troops raved with hunger and literally fell asleep while shooting. Officers stumbled up and down the trenches, “muttering like sleepwalkers, beating the soldiers with the flat of their swords.”23