The Eastern Front 1914-1917

by Norman Stone

  Falkenhayn had instructed men to hold ‘every square foot of line’—not a sensible policy, since the Austrian soldiery was simply taken prisoner while doing so. He had in mind a great counter-stroke, against the northern flank of Kaledin’s salient—a flank that now reached the river Stokhod. By 20th June, twelve and a half Austro-German divisions were gathered, under a German, Marwitz. Most of the German divisions were either second-class troops, or tired units from the western front. In any case, the Central Powers’ effort was split—of sixteen and a half fresh divisions sent by 20th June, nine went to Volhynia, two to Südarmee, the rest to the Dniester front. The counter-offensive on the Stokhod went wrong—at best a few miles forward, for very high losses. 2,000 prisoners were made, and four guns taken; but losses reached 40,000, and the Austrian IV Army, bewildered at the experience of advancing, was counter-attacked and driven far beyond its starting-point. The offensive was switched from the northern to the southern side of Kaledin’s salient on 22nd June. It made no difference, even though Austrian groups now came under German commanders. On the Dniester, the Russian advance continued throughout the latter part of June: reserves were too few to stop it. The only thing that saved this area was the supply-difficulty encountered by Lechitski.

  In reality, the first wave of reserves, sent in various directions and in packets by Conrad and Falkenhayn, had failed to serve any useful purpose. Marwitz’s counter-attack merely broke up the reserve-forces still more. The way was therefore open for a renewal of Brusilov’s offensive, again along the whole front. The four new corps were put into line, attacking the Styr salient early in July. Between 3rd and 6th July the salient collapsed, the troops of III and VIII Armies being drawn against it—III Army with five army corps, against two. The guns had been well-prepared, the troops trained; the marshes had also dried, and threw up clouds of dust that obscured the defenders’ view. 30,000 prisoners and thirty guns were taken, even German troops’ morale now collapsing. Now the Russians came up against the Stokhod, base of this salient. Two German divisions came to hold the line, and succeeded, with the loss of a bridgehead or two, in achieving this. In the south, there was also a minor repetition of early June. Lechitski’s army drove against VII Army late in June, encountered divisons that counted less than a regiment at half-strength, and captured a series of towns leading to Halicz. A German counter-attack failed, the three reserve divisions (Kraewel) being largely wasted and the Russians being treated even to the unusual spectacle of German troops fleeing, having to be sabred back, by Austrian generals, to their front lines.37 Most of the Bukovina was taken by the Russians, and the southern flank of Südarmee turned on the Dniester. Now Falkenhayn could not refuse to send troops—four German divisions were sent to the Dniester front, two Turkish divisons were promised as well. In this period, even the weak Russian XI Army did well, advancing over the Galician border to take Brody in mid-month. The northern flank of Südarmee was turned, and that army had to undertake a retreat—such that it stood only thirty miles east of Lwów.

  On the other hand, attempts by the Russians to break out on the German part of the front failed. On 2nd July the promised offensive of Evert began, at Baranovitchi. It was a piece of fatalism, not unlike Lake Narotch. Ragoza, the army commander, had prepared an attack on Vilna, for over two months. He was now given two weeks to prepare one instead in the marshy region north of Pinsk. At Baranovitchi, there was some tactical advantage—a German salient, occupied, as it happened, by two Austrian divisions. Otherwise, there was only marsh. There was no time to sap forward, no time for guns to register properly. A huge force of cavalry clogged the supply-lines. Twenty-one and a half infantry, five cavalry divisions were gathered. A thousand guns opened the bombardment, with a thousand rounds each. This was not effective. Two German divisions were brought in as reserves just before the attack began; the bombardment, though lasting for several days, achieved nothing in particular. A few initial tactical successes came—3,000 prisoners, a few guns, On 4th July one of the two Austrian divisions collapsed, and the line was held by reserve Germans. Then the attack stopped—resumed again with bombardment on 7th July, and again stopped. By 8th July the Russians had lost 80,000 men, the Germans 16,000. Yet this attack had used up more shell than the whole of Brusilov’s front in the first week of his offensive.

  With this, efforts to involve the other two fronts came virtually to a stop: troops were now diverted to Brusilov’s front, as the other two commanders parted with troops in order to avoid having to attack again. In the south, Lechitski carried on along the Dniester, to take Halicz in the latter part of July. In East Galicia, there was an advance from one tributary of the Dniester to another. But Brusilov decided that the time had come for a great attack towards Kowel38—north-east from the Stokhod positions. If he could take Kowel, the German line to the north would be turned, and Evert’s front would be allowed forward. After the fall of the Styr salient, his troops occupied the Stokhod and hoped for great things. Brusilov himself seems to have given up his own methods—preferring to believe that, now that his front had been guaranteed unlimited reinforcement, a direct attack of the battering-ram type should be attempted. He was given control of III Army, the southernmost of Evert’s front. He set VIII Army, as before, to move west against the Austro-Germans; in between, he would have a new force, the Guard Army.

  With this, he achieved almost two-fold superiority of numbers, the more so as the Austrian troops were still in woeful condition. The front as a whole had taken 40,000 men and sixty-three guns in the offensive of 4th to 7th July, and since early June, nearly 260,000 men with 330 guns. But Brusilov’s own losses had been high—5,000 officers lost, 60,000 men killed, 370,000 wounded, 60,000 missing. The trained men were running out, and untrained recruits were not able to continue the attack on previous lines. Brusilov’s great hope was the new, Guard Army—60,000 men of the highest physical standard, supposedly given competent training in the rear for the past few months. But the training had been entrusted to officers who knew little of modern war; and the command of the Guard lay in the hands, similarly, of men who were not even very competent in the out-of-date methods they prescribed. The commander was Bezobrazov, with his ineradicable pantomime-machismo; the chief of staff, Ignatiev, who, in Brusilov’s words,39 ‘knew nothing whatever of staff work’; the chief artillerist, the Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, ‘a worthy man who had not, however, grasped the importance of artillery’; the commander of 1. Guard Corps, Grand Duke Paul, ‘an exceptionally fine man with no real knowledge’; the commander of 2. Guard Corps, Rauch, ‘capable but losing his nerve under rifle-fire’.

  The Guard Army arrived on the banks of the Stokhod, and was set the task of breaking through towards Kowel,40 with the help of III and VIII Armies—together, 250,000 men to 115,000. The attacks of mid-July had failed, and the Guard was expected to attack towards the end of the month after some preparation. The Russians’ weight was now far beyond anything seen in the eastern front, and the German commander (Marwitz) subsequently said it was ‘like conditions in the west’. The Guard used a hundred guns of the heaviest calibre, whereas no German operation in the east had never used more than forty of these great-guns. Aircraft began to come into their own, although those on the Russian side seem to have been dominated by numerically-inferior German fliers, who on one occasion even caused 200 casualties in the headquarters of the Guard Army, and who caused much damage to Russian morale by flying low over the field, machine-gunning the infantry. Overall, there were six Russian shells to one German. This great battering-ram was levelled at Kowel from late July until early October, offensives being made again and again, usually at fortnightly intervals. But the terrain was manifestly unsuitable. The river Stokhod itself was not much of an obstacle, being shallow and slow-moving. But to either side there were marshes, and although this sometimes meant that the defenders could not drag their guns away to safety, it also meant that attackers lost so heavily that most writers dismiss the offensives as criminal. One Guard office
r remarked that ‘you could cross the region in a plane, never on foot’, and paths through the marshes allowed men to go only in single file. The Guard attacked here on 28th July, continuing the process until early August. On 28th July, with losses of over half the men, a minor height at Trysten was taken—500 prisoners and eight guns. The other Guard Corps profited from this to drive a wedge in the German line to take forty-six guns and 5,000 prisoners as well. But both of the Guard Corps lost 30,000 men in this affair, and the attack could never be repeated with the same weight.

  It was only on the front of the Austrian IV Army that successes of real effectiveness could be gained—early in August, VIII Army resumed its drive to the west, and took 12,000 prisoners of one division (and only two guns). Hell, chief of staff to Linsingen’s army group, described the front as ‘a powder-barrel’; the Austrians were ‘indescribable’. From now on, German and Austrian troops were mixed, even at company level. The Austrian IV Army, while still theoretically in existence, was in practice run by Marwitz, then Litzmann, both Germans; and it appears that, with Prussian N.C.O.s and officers, even Czechs and Ruthenes would fight against the Russians. In August, despite uneasy moments, even this front began to show some solidity; while the German troops of Linsingen’s command contained all of Bezobrazov’s attempts to get beyond the Stokhod bridges towards Kowel. In eastern Galicia, there were also uneasy moments throughout August, Südarmee having to retreat. But reserve troops, even including a Turkish corps, arrived to stabilise the line on the Zlóta Lipa, In August, it was mainly in the south, Lechitski’s front, that the great advances of the Brusilov offensive were continued. Halicz was taken, and neither the Austrian nor the German groups offered much resistance—even cavalry was effective. By late July, Lechitski had penetrated even the Carpathian passes leading into Hungary; and although four German divisions were sent—the deutsches Karpatenkorps—and a new Austro-Hungarian army (III), the only way Lechitski could be held was the increasing difficulty of terrain as he entered the Carpathians. It seemed that all this, occurring on the borders of Romania, would at last bring Romania out of her neutrality.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Romanian Campaign, 1916–1917

  At the end of August 1916, Romania declared war on Austria-Hungary, and shortly afterwards found herself at war with all four Central Powers. Since 1914, men had been waiting for this. Romania awaited national unification, and coveted the tracts of Austria-Hungary inhabited by Romanians. So long as the Central Powers appeared invincible, Romania could not risk intervening against them. Her strategic situation was peculiarly vulnerable. But with the great run of Russian victories, her confidence rose. Moreover, by August 1916, the western Powers were prepared to guarantee much more territory than hitherto: the French, in particular, with an eye to the post-war situation, wanted to establish a greater Romania as a bulwark against Russia. On 17th August, a military convention was signed, providing for extensive Entente assistance, financial and military. The twenty or so Romanian divisions would, it was thought, decisively affect the eastern front as a whole.1 With 366 battalions of infantry, 106 squadrons of cavalry and 1,300 guns (half of them modern) the Romanian army could invade Hungary and turn the Central Powers’ lines to the north.

  It is not altogether easy to see why men expected the intervention of small powers to be so decisive. No doubt it was an illusion that—like much else in this war—owed something to misreadings of Napoleonic history. The nationalistic vibrations of Madrid and Lisbon were thought to have shaken the French Empire at its foundations; the Peninsular War to have exposed the ‘soft underbelly’ of Napoleonic Europe. In reality, nationalism had been much less important than the heavy pounding to which the French armies had been subjected in Austria and Russia; and men also forgot that the Peninsular War involved an army that was, by the standards of the time, large and efficient. The Romanian army could not stand comparison. Of its 620,000 soldiers, a third would be taken up in supply-lines, and almost all were illiterate. The officers lacked experience, and were also inclined to panic. All foreigners noted the incidence of what was delicately known as ‘immoralité : indeed among the first prescriptions,, on mobilisation, was a decree that only officers above the rank of major had the right to use make-up. Langlois, not an unfriendly observer, thought the ‘soldat excellent, officier dépourvu de toute moralité militaire, Etat-major et commandement presque nuls’ .2 British observers felt that the operations of the Romanian army would make a public-school field-day look like the execution of the Schlieffen Plan; while the comments of Russians who had to fight side-by-side with the Romanians were often unprintable. As things turned out, it was the Russians, and not the Central Powers, who suffered from a Romanian ulcer. Almost a third of the Russian army had to be diverted to the south. This did not save Romania. On the contrary, the Central Powers conquered the country easily enough, and, in the next year and a half, removed far more from it than they could have done had it remained neutral: over a million tons of oil, over two million tons of grain, 200,000 tons of timber, 100,000 head of cattle, 200,000 goats and pigs, over and above the quantities requisitioned for maintenance of the armies of occupation.3 Romanian intervention, in other words, made possible the Germans’ continuation of the war into 1918.

  The essential reason for this, as for the halting, overall, of Russian victories, was the Central Powers’ capacity to shift their reserves quickly. In Napoleonic days, sea-power had allowed the British to shift their troops faster than the French, who were dependent on horses. Now, railways gave much the same advantage over sea-power that sea-power had had before over horses. Provided the railways were properly-managed, they could shuttle troops within a few days from Italy to Volhynia, France to the Balkans. It had taken the Germans, in spring 1915, hardly more than a week to assemble their XI Army against the Russian lines at Gorlice, whereas it took the western Powers six weeks to assemble an equivalent force for their assault on the Dardanelles at the same time; and even the Turkish railways were such that the western Powers had to face a superiority to two-to-one within a few days of their landing at Gallipoli. In September 1916, the Central Powers sent 1,500 trains through Hungary—not far short of the number used by Austria-Hungary to mobilise against Russia two years before—and assembled a force equivalent to the entire Romanian army within three weeks of Romania’s intervention. In the First World War, it was the great profusion of reserves that counted for most. Contrary to legend, it was not so much the difficulty, or physical impossibility, of breaking through trench-lines that led to the war’s being such a protracted and bloody affair, but rather the fact that even a badly-defeated army could rely on reserves, moving in by railway. The conscription of whole generations, and particularly the enlarged capacity to supply millions of soldiers, meant that man-power was, to all intents and purposes, inexhaustible: even the total casualties of this war were a small proportion of the available man-power.

  The basis of Brusilov’s great successes in June and July 1916 had been the Central Powers’ inadequate use of their reserves. To some degree, this was a consequence of Brusilov’s own methods: a broad-front, well-prepared, many-front offensive between Volhynia and Romania. Local reserves had been frittered away between the various points of attack. In the southern sector, on both sides of the river Dniester, the Central Powers had been particularly embarrassed by Brusilov’s methods. They left troops to cover the Romanian border, as well as troops to cover the Dniester flank of Südarmee, on which their Galician lines depended. Seven Austro-Hungarian divisions, and even a German force, the Karpatenkorps, had been pushed in to defend the Hungarian border and the southern Bukovina: a force contained, as things turned out, by little more than a Russian cavalry corps. The Russians had been able to win further great victories along the Dniester, which had forced a further diversion of German and Austro-Hungarian reserves and thus allowed the Russians in Volhynia to win successes in July. It was of course true that the Russian army, by following Brusilov’s methods, itself dispensed
with reserves that might have followed up the victories it won. But the prizes were great enough: by the end of August, the Austro-Hungarian army had lost 614,000 men in the east, and the Germans, by their own account, 150,000.4

  More important, however, had been the confusion among the Central Powers’ leaders. Ludendorff would not help Falkenhayn, and Falkenhayn would not help Conrad, since each one had his priorities, of which even military disaster produced merely a re-statement. Falkenhayn’s priorities had been in the west: Verdun, then the Somme, preliminary bombardment for which had begun on 24th June. He resented any diversion of troops from France, and demanded that Conrad should give up his Italian offensive first. Conrad was reluctant to do this, because that offensive seemed to promise real success. In this way, only five divisions were sent from the west for most of June, and initially only two and a half from Italy. The divisions were also tired from fighting—in the case of the German divisions, tired from Verdun to the point of virtual uselessness in the field, as the fate of Marwitz’s offensive on the Stokhod showed. At the same time, both Conrad and Falkenhayn appealed to Ludendorff, commanding the greater part of the Germans’ eastern front. But Ludendorff also made out that he could not afford to part with troops, and in June sent only two under-strength divisions to help in Volhynia. He had good excuses. His troops faced twice their numbers, and although Kuropatkin and Evert seldom bothered to attack with any seriousness, the threat was always there. In any case, none of the men in Ludendorff’s headquartersfelt any sympathy with Falkenhayn. Hoffmann thought that ‘the Austrians’ defeat is no doubt deplorable, but that is no reason for us to tear our hair out’.5 On the contrary, since Falkenhayn had reduced Ludendorff’s sphere of responsibility, the business must be settled by him and Conrad. Maybe, too, Ludendorff secretly calculated that withholding reserves would so embarrass Falkenhayn and Conrad that they would have to let Ludendorff once more control most of the eastern front. Whatever the case, throughout June 1916 the Austro-Hungarian front acquired only a dozen reserve divisions, at that frittered away between the Dniester and the Stokhod. This had allowed Brusilov to win a further set of victories in July.