The Eastern Front 1914-1917

by Norman Stone

  After artillery preparation, we went about a mile forward under heavy enemy gunfire. Once we were within five hundred yards, we were hit, suddenly, by devastating machine-gun and rifle-fire that had hitherto been silent. There was the enemy, in solid trenches with great parapets and dug-outs; sitting behind ten or fifteen rows of uncut wire, waiting for us. We lay on the frozen ground, for hours, as the snow drifted down; if we were wounded, there was no help because we were so close to the wire. But behind us, there were artillery colonels and captains of the General Staff, drinking rum tea, and writing their reports—‘After brilliant artillery preparation our glorious forces rushed forward to occupy the enemy trenches, but were held up by counter-attack of strong reserves.’16

  The generals had been led to error by the myths of shell-shortage. They had not noted the need for intense preparation, for disruption of enemy reserves in particular. They now responded by supposing, on the whole, that yet more shell would be needed for break-through. They do not appear to have altered their tactics in a significant degree. After the failure of the offensive in Bessarabia, a document was produced by VII Army command and by Ivanov’s headquarters, discussing failure. Lack of shell was mentioned, particularly by Shcherbachev, as taking first place—although in practice he was to break through in the same area a few months later, with brilliant results, with barely more shell than he had had in the Bessarabian offensive. Obvious truths were stated—the need for reserves to be closer to the front line, for better observation of the enemy artillery. But it needed the genius of Brusilov for anything to emerge from this but stale imitations of French practices of 1915.

  A new Russia was indeed beginning to emerge in 1916. But its shape was not at all clear. There were now large numbers of junior officers and General Staff men who were thoroughly discontented with ‘the system’—men of high military competence, whose services the Bolsheviks knew how to exploit to the full. But for a variety of reasons, they did not get much authority in the army. Much of the officers’ corps was made up of sprigs of the middle-classes, not used to exerting authority; and there were not many officers, in any event—in the specially-favoured ‘descent-force’ on the Black Sea coast, ninety-nine officers for 2,890 men in the 3. Turkestan Rifle Brigade, 157 for 5,026 in 41. infantry division; officers, at that, barely-trained for the job. In the Russian army, with its immense problems of untrained man-power, the authorities always tended to prefer old regular soldiers to civilians. The civilian intake might be more adaptable; but it had not the habit of authority that alone—it seemed—could make the Russian soldier into a good fighting machine. Promotions tended therefore to be a battleground between the rival cliques of the army—the Grand Ducal men on the one side, the remnants of the Sukhomlinovshchina on the other. The crisis of 1915–16 did make for some change, but the authorities reacted with extraordinary conservatism just the same. They went on promoting strange figures to commands.17 For instance, in this period the Guard was taken out of line for re-training, due to last nine months. It was now made into two corps, with a cavalry corps, and contained men of the highest physical standard. It was then extensively trained, by veterans of Plevna, in the methods of 1877. One corps command went to Grand Duke Paul, an aged cavalryman. His chief of staff was a man to whom staff-work was quite new—Count Ignatiev, appointed mainly because the commandant of the Tsar’s Palace, Voyeykov, wanted him removed from the post he had at Tsarskoye Selo, where his influence on the Tsar had not been in Voyeykov’s interest.

  The pride of this collection was General Bezobrazov, appointed to command the whole of the Guard Army, as the two infantry corps and the cavalry corps were collectively known. He was in his late sixties when appointed to this position. His previous history did not justify such honour—he had been among the men who had led the Tsar into the gross bungling of war with Japan. In war, he commanded a Guard division, with Olokhov as corps commander. He refused to obey Olokhov’s orders, and the two men fought publicly at a station. Bezobrazov was then removed from his command. He used his influence with the Tsar, and was appointed to command the entire Guard Corps. In the retreat of summer 1915, he quarrelled with the commander of III Army: Lesh, its commander, wanted the Guard to retreat, covering another corps. Bezobrazov announced that the Guard never retreated, and the other corps was badly let-down, while the Guard underwent a futile sacrifice. The two men then had a competition in insulting telegrams, as result of which Bezobrazov was removed from his corps command. But he was apparently a man of astonishingly high influence—the Tsar regarded him as ‘charming’, although in junior officers’ eyes he was ‘a ruin, with the dull gaze of a gourmand, hardly able to drag his log-like legs around’. He represented to the Tsar that the Guard ‘should only be commanded by people of class’; and for the sentiment was rewarded with command of the Guard Army itself. He used the position, moreover, to appoint as divisional commanders favourites of his who had been removed, for incompetence, from regimental commands. Bezobrazov’s case was only the most notorious. There were a great many similar ones—commanders removed from one position, only to be given another, and sometimes higher, one after using their influence at Court or Ministry. Radko-Dmitriev, removed from III Army in spring 1915, went to XII Army a few months later. Ruzski was a boneless wonder, three times appointed to command the northern front—the third time because the Tsar wished to remove Kuropatkin from it, but without making him feel that it was because he was too old. Ruzski, being older than Kuropatkin, could reassure him that he had been dismissed for inefficiency, not for age. Artamonov, of East Prussian fame, surfaced as governor of Przemyśl; both Pflug and Sievers got corps after losing armies. Langlois, the most acute of foreign observers, wrote this ‘particularité curieusement fâcheuse’ down to Stavka’s not having power—able to dismiss, not to appoint. But this was not the whole story, as Stavka could arrange appointments. The difficulty came with the division between the front and the rear military authorities—the rear authorities, inheritors of Sukhomlinov, suspected, quite rightly, that their friends were being unfairly removed, just as Stavka suspected that, when its friends were removed by war ministry fiat, incompetence was not at all the whole story. When incompetent commanders slipped through, they did so by playing off one side against the other. When the system was challenged, the commanders could always retort that it was shortage of shell, or shortage of officers, and the low quality of the men that were responsible for defeat and retreat. In this way, the shell-shortage came to be an excuse for everything; and, even when the shortage was demonstrably less acute, the commanders still reacted—as they did after the Bessarabian affair—by blaming shortage of shell. A thousand rounds per gun could not be enough; there must be a great deal more before an offensive could be launched. In the meantime, elderly generals had a wonderful time inventing ways of winning the war. Kuropatkin, whose conduct of affairs in Manchuria had not been of the best, surfaced, after eighteen months’ pulling of long faces to war ministry and Stavka alike, and was given command of the Grenadier corps. He distinguished himself by a suggestion that attack should be made at night, with the aid of search-lights—these would be shone, presumably to dazzling effect, in the Germans’ eyes. The Russian attackers were silhouetted against their own lights; the corps lost 8,000 men in a night.

  The last real effort by the old Russian army—as distinct from the new, which emerged in summer 1916 on Brusilov’s front—was the offensive staged at Lake Narotch in March 1916. It was an affair that summed up all that was most wrong with the army. There had been talk of a spring offensive for some time—Stavka had felt that the results of Sventsiany in September 1915 justified a renewal of the offensive in this region; and the French were even told that it could well win the war outright. Now, the bulk of German troops had gone against France, had lost heavily at Verdun. Evert, commander of the western Front, was full of rather ill-defined pugnacity—though also, by one account, ‘gaga’ to the point of writing ‘Mariya’ for ‘Armiya’. Moreover, the French had be
en told, in December, that if one ally was attacked, the others must launch immediate offensives to save it—an argument designed to save the Russian army from the isolation of summer 1915, and now turned against Russia. French appeals for help went out as soon as the German offensive began at Verdun. Alexeyev could not refuse his help. Stavka was now prisoner of its own arguments. Alexeyev had told Zhilinski to suggest that Russia was now strong enough to attack. Privately, he did not feel this at all—there had been delays in the re-organisation, and the army, now counting 1,700,000 men at the front—with 1,250,000 rifles—was not yet strong enough for offensive action. Evert, too, began to quail at the thought of attack once he was asked to bring his pugnacity to some concrete expression—no doubt he had, in the interim, read the south-western commanders’ reports on the failure of their winter offensive, where a thousand guns with a thousand rounds each, and two-fold superiority of numbers, had failed to make much of a dent in the Austro-Hungarian lines. But not much could be done: an offensive would have to be staged for the benefit of the French. On 24th February—three days after the Germans launched their attack on Verdun—there was a conference in Stavka. The Russian superiority of numbers was now considerable—on the northern front, 300,000 to 180,000; on the western, 700,000 to 360,000 (917 battalions to 382) with 526 cavalry squadrons to 144; and on the south-western front, about half a million men on either side (684 Russian battalions to 592, and 492 squadrons to 239).

  It was felt that the western front—Evert’s—should attack. The shell-reserve had now been built up to 1,250 rounds for the 5,000 field guns, 540 for the 585 field-howitzers, and 685 rounds each for nearly a thousand guns—a force that, if concentrated, must surely bring great results. It would be Evert’s duty to ensure concentration of this force. There were also, now, increasingly, rises in the number of battalions and divisions, of which there were 152 in March, 163½ in summer, with forty-seven cavalry divisions, later fifty. The area of attack18 was much the same as in September 1915—east of Vilna. The two army groups, Kuropatkin’s and Evert’s, must co-operate in attacking, one to the south-west against Vilna, the other due west from the line of lakes east of Vilna. The Russians’ superiority was a considerable one—II Army, on the line of lakes, assembled 253 battalions and 233 squadrons of cavalry, over 350,000 men, with 605 light and 282 heavy guns—982 in all if two corps in reserve are included. There were ten army corps involved, over twenty divisions. The German X Army, here, had four and a half infantry divisions, subsequently built up to seven: 75,000 men, with 300 guns, subsequently built up to 440. It is, in the first place, notable enough that the Russian superiority at Lake Narotch—in men, guns, and shell (since each gun had a thousand rounds and more) was considerably greater than had been the Germans’ superiority in May 1915 at Gorlice, or even in July 1915 on the Narev.

  The difficulties came, as usual, with command and operations. In the first place, the promised co-operation of Kuropatkin’s front did not come into much effect, beyond a feeble demonstration at Dvinsk that cost 15,000 men. II Army was commanded by General Smirnov, born in 1849, ‘a soft old man with no distinction of any kind’. Usually, he played patience while Evert’s chief of staff did the work; Evert, himself elderly, resisted attempts to have him dismissed by reason of age; and he was removed from command only just before the attack, to be replaced by the younger Ragoza—a man altogether unfamiliar with II Army, and subsequently replaced in turn by Smirnov. The corps were drawn up in groups, each commanded by the commander of one of the corps involved—as usual, on principles of seniority. In this case, the groups were taken by Pleshkov, Sirelius, Baluyev. Of Sirelius, Alexeyev wrote, ‘It seems unlikely that he will be able to manage the bold and connected offensive action or the systematic execution of a plan that are needed.’ But attempts to remove Sirelius broke down because, it is alleged, ‘some old granny still has flutterings about the heart when his name comes up’.19

  The offensive was carried out at a time of the year that could not have been less suitable if it had been chosen by the Germans. It opened on 18th March. The winter conditions had given way to those of early spring—alternating freezes and thaws that made the roads either an ice-rink or a morass. Shell would explode to little effect against ground that was either hard as iron or churned to a morass; gas was also ineffective in the cold. Supplies presented problems that the best-trained army would have found impossible to solve: the man-handling of boxes of heavy shell through slush that was a foot deep. The Russian rear was a scene of epic confusion—complicated by the astonishingly large masses of cavalry deployed there, to no effect whatsoever at the front. It was altogether an episode that suggests commanders had lost such wits as they still possessed. Preparations had gone on for some time, or so Evert alleged. In practice, the Russians’ positions were sketchy—some parts of their line were protected only by staves in the ground, and Kondratovitch, who inspected II Army’s positions, said that, when snow fell, rifle-fire became impossible. 20. Corps was sited in a marshy region, with its rear in full view of German artillery. There had been almost no preparation of dug-outs20—nor, in view of the season, could there be. But the elderly commanders, their mental digestions still coping uneasily with the lessons of 1915, were in no condition to think things out. The Germans received a fortnight’s warning of the offensive—it was even discussed by the cooks in Evert’s headquarters three weeks before it began.

  The attack began with bombardment on 18th March, the northernmost of the corps groups—Pleshkov’s—leading off. Of all bombardments in the First World War, this was—with strong competition—the most futile. It was subsequently known as ‘General Pleshkov’s son et lumière’. A subsequent investigation of the artillery-affairs in this battle revealed that only in Baluyev’s group had there been discussion between senior artillery and infantry officers on the ground—as distinct from maps—as to how things should go. Almost no reconnaissance had been conducted, so that the guns fired blind—on Pleshkov’s front, they were even told to fire blind into a wood, behind which the Germans were thought to be. On Sirelius’s front, the guns registered on their own infantry’s trenches, in case the Germans came to occupy them. The guns were useless against German enfilading-positions and communications-trenches, since no-one knew with any accuracy where they were; even observation-posts for the guns were, as things turned out, vulnerable to machine-gun fire. It was only on 7th March that Pleshkov’s artillery was told what to do, and the instructions were changed on 13th March, the guns having to be hauled over marsh and slush to new positions. A further peculiarity was that artillery was divided into light and heavy groups: the heavy artillery of Pleshkov’s group was mainly concentrated in the hands of Zakutovski, the light artillery mainly in the hands of Prince Masalski, corps artillery commander. The two men quarrelled—Zakutovski believing that, as commander of the whole group’s artillery, he should be giving the orders, while Masalski reckoned that, being commander of artillery in the corps mainly involved (1.), he should have the task. There was almost no co-operation between the two men; and shell-delivery became difficult enough, since heavy rounds would be delivered to Masalski, light ones to Zakutovski, and not released by them—even if the morass had allowed it. One Corps (1st Siberian) got half the shell it needed; another (1st) twice as much as it could use. This was more than a battle of competence. It reflected the poor state of relations between infantrymen and gunners, Masalski protecting the one, and Zakutovski the other. In this way, many gunners’ tasks were not carried out at all, and many duplicated. Light artillery tried to do the work of heavy, heavy of light.21

  Pleshkov had supposed that a narrow concentration of guns—on two kilometres of his twenty-kilometre sector—would create a break-through. His guns fired off their 200 rounds per day, commanders feeling that a weight like this—after all, equivalent to three months’ use of shell, as foreseen in 1914—could not go wrong. With four army corps on a front of twenty kilometres, against a German infantry division with one cavalry division
, there ought not, in commanders’ view, to be any difficulty. By sending in waves of infantry on two kilometres, Pleshkov merely gave the German artillery a magnificent target; and when, as happened, these occupied German trenches, they would be fired on from three sides by German guns on the sides of the salient—guns that had been registered previously on the trenches, which were found evacuated. One division attacked before the other, because of an error in telephone-messages; it even attacked, on 18th March, under its own bombardment, no doubt because liaison between Zakutovski and Masalski was so poor. A further corps assaulted the woods of Postawy, also in vain—German guns being concealed by the woods. In all, Pleshkov’s group lost 15,000 men in the first eight hours of this offensive—three-quarters of the infantry mustered for attack, although fifteen per cent of Pleshkov’s total force. On 19th March the attacks were continued, although trenches now filled with water as rain came, with a thaw. There were minor tactical successes—600 prisoners being taken—and losses of 5,000 in a few hours, equivalent to a whole brigade. On 21st March Pleshkov tried again, and even Kuropatkin stumbled forward. Each lost 10,000. In the rear, confusion—brought about mainly by the presence of 233 cavalry squadrons, who monopolised supplies and transport—was of crisis proportions, the hospital-trains breaking down, troops going hungry while meat rotted in depots. Over half of all orders were counter-manded.

  The only success of any dimensions came on Baluyev’s front, on Lake Narotch, where artillery and infantry had co-operated. At dawn on 21st March Baluyev attacked along the shores of Lake Narotch, using the ice, and helped by thick fog. His gunners sustained an artillery duel with the Germans, and a few square miles were taken, with some thousand prisoners. Sirelius, to the north, would not help at all, relapsing into cabbalistic utterance, and losing only one per cent of his force—through frost-bite. In the next few days, there were repeated attempts by Baluyev and Pleshkov; then the affair settled down to an artillery-duel. Later on, in April, the Germans took what they had lost. In all, they had had to move three divisions to face this attack, ostensibly, of 350,000 Russians. Not one of these came from the western front. The Russian army lost 100,000 men in this engagement—as well as 12,000 men who died of frostbite. The Germans claimed to have lifted 5,000 corpses from their wire. They themselves lost 20,000 men.