The Eastern Front 1914-1917
Page 48
* There is a famous story concerning this retreat, told by Hoffmann. A German communications corporal overheard a message from one Austrian unit to another, to the effect that the Austrians were to retreat, but not to tell their German neighbours that they were doing so. It turns out that this was bungling, rather than bad faith. The Austrians meant to retire on 27th October, but did so, from force of circumstances, on 26th. Their links to the neighbouring German unit was poor, and they informed the German corps beyond it what was to happen. The chief of staff of this corps asked them to delay informing their neighbouring corps, which was then fighting successfully. The Austrians then consulted higher quarters, the conversation no doubt overheard by Hoffmann’s corporal. In the event, the Austrian liaison officer, at some risk to himself, hurried to inform the corps concerned that retreat was imminent. The affair was thoroughly investigated by an Austrian communications-officer involved: O.Wolf-Schneider-Arno: ‘Der Gefreite des Generals Hoffmann’ in a Sonderdruck of the Oesterreichische Wehrzeitung, Folgen 43–46, of November 1924. The original documents of I Army (Fasz. 140) confirm Wolf’s account, not Hoffmann’s.
* The ‘heroic defence of Przemyśl’ had of course been a stock theme of propaganda. But the defenders had, in reality, very little to do but wait, since the Russians had little heavy artillery to knock down the defences, and could not manoeuvre such heavy guns as they had. The garrison was not impressive. A British observer thought the men looked ‘half-starved’; ‘a more hopeless, dejected crowd I have never seen’, whereas ‘the officers were immaculately dressed and wore a prosperous and well-fed look and, according to the inhabitants, had lived in every luxury including female society of the most aggressive type’.18
* The Monarchy’s servants even began to lose their grasp of ceremonial, unthinkable in Franz Joseph’s day. At Karl’s coronation in Budapest, there was a revealing scene. A representative of the magnates made a long and emotional speech. Karl’s attention wandered, and as a result he missed his cue for the response, until Tisza, with exquisite symbolism, gave him a nudge.
* Pares, whose accounts of Russia in the last days of Tsarism are famous, espoused Russian liberalism and its legends. He was sent out by the Foreign Office in 1915 to observe the eastern front, which he toured by bicycle. He sent back lengthy reports, written in indelible ink, which he later published; but they deserve caution. The Foreign Office felt that ‘much of his efforts’ was ‘valueless’, and he seems to have been retained mainly because he had an energetic impracticality that gave him unique feeling for Russian liberals.
* Rifle-bullets were also used more generously on this front than in the west. A figure supplied by Alexeyev to the French, in January 1916, showed that Russian rifles used 125 rounds per man-month, French ones 30 and British ones 50. The Artillery Department suspected that troops also concealed both rifles and ammunition. A great deal of Austrian munition was captured, and so many rifles that Russian bullet-factories were ordered to produce 37 million rounds p.a. for them, until 1916, when Brusilov captured so many that the order was countermanded. Two corps of VIII Army were armed with Austrian rifles, and the Department always suspected that there were many more in existence, undeclared.
* Hanbury-Williams was not of course a very perceptive witness. He owed his appointment as British military representative to Stavka to nothing other than his distant ancestor’s having had some success, as ambrassadeur, with Catherine the Great, and his supposed despatches from the front display, apart from weakness in spelling, a very shaky knowledge of eastern-European geography.
* Grand Duke Sergey opposed the order. But Stavka sent a telegram to Kitchener, informing him that he should go ahead. The first that the Artillery Department heard of this was two months later, when the British military attaché, Knox, arrived to ask for blue-prints of Russian shell.19
* Routes through Sweden counted for something, when the Swedes were not in a black-mailing mood; and a further possibility, of suitable picturesqueness, occurred when the authorities discovered that reindeer-sledges, driven by Lapps, could transport goods from the western harbours of the White Sea to the railheads of Rovaniemi or Uleaborg in Finland. The Lapps at first resisted conscription for this, because they had a statute guaranteeing them against it, but Admiral Roshchakovski threatened to hang their chiefs, and they submitted. In December 1915 the British were informed that they might use this route: ‘Enquiries should be made to the Archimandrite Jonaphan, Prior of the Tripheno-Petchengy monastery’, and early in 1916 the sledges carried 100 tons daily, being particularly useful for aircraft-parts. The French were very taken with this system. The British were much less impressed with it, and itched with disapproval. In the context of the 10,000 tons a day to be shifted, it was not worth hanging Lapps in order to move 100.23
* The Putilovski, Baltiyski, Nevski, Obukhovski, Petrogradski-mekhanicheski, Sormovski, Izhevski, Izhorski, Nikolayevski, Aboski factories, the firms ‘Vulcan’ and Löwenstern, and the Russkoye obshchestvo dlya izgotovleniya snaryadov, which between them had contracts, for 6,650,000 shrapnels and 1,060,000 high-explosive shells, by October 1914, at a cost of nearly 100,000,000 roubles.26
* Germany profited, in this connection, almost at once. Paradoxically, this occurred not because of the German soldiers’ foresight, but because of the allied blockade. Germany could not rely on foreign suppliers; she developed her own. Moreover, the blockade not only stopped imports from outside Europe; it stopped exports. This delighted the British, and depressed the Germans—even in September 1914, there was forty per cent unemployment in Nuremberg because the Franconian pencil-makers and pencil-sharpener-makers, who supplied the world, were deprived of markets. But the pool of skilled labour that this created, and still more, perhaps, the quantities of now unusable raw-materials, were of the utmost service to the war-effort, and areas such as Franconia became important centres of the munitions-industry overnight, and to everyone’s surprise. It would be interesting to speculate how much less war-goods Germany would have produced if the British had allowed her to go on exporting.37
* It may not have been much comfort. In the days when people expected the war to be short, there was a rush of charitable offers: rich ladies would run hospital-trains, and their daughters would do the nursing. Princess Shcherbatova operated, for her group of ladies, eighteen hospital-trains, costing 150,000 roubles per month. As the war lasted, she became disgruntled, and demanded that the army authorities should take some of the cost. They disliked the idea, because the trains were heavy, and took only one-third the wounded that army trains could take. Each sister had her own coupé, and the trains had a way of finding themselves in the rear of the ultra-marriageable Guard Corps. Ordinary wounded men were sometimes dumped on to army hospital trains; and the nurses were allowed to accommodate only ‘cases of light wounds, above the belt’.5
* An Austrian calculation was that each beast gave 500 portions, but this included gristle, which was turned into ‘Dauerwurst’.7
* See Note on the Tsar’s Stavka at the end of the chapter.
* One example was Solodovnikov, owner of the Revdinskoye factory in the Urals. He took large advances from the State, but could not use them properly. He devoted them to speculation in commodities—sugar, grain etc.—which, in time of inflation, offered quick profits. Then the State wanted to know what had happened to its contract. He at once decreed, in his factory, that there would be parity of wages between men and women; and used the resulting strike as excuse for non-delivery of the contracted war-goods.6
†It is evidence of the often curious link between Sukhomlinovtsy and the Red Army that Myasoyedov’s brother taught for years in a Soviet military academy.
* These issues are more fully discussed in chapter 13.
* 242,000,000 roubles, of which it fulfilled 80,000,000 by 1st January 1917.
†This percentage is sometimes taken to apply to all industrial enterprises. Had it done so, there would have been no trouble with the War-Industries Committees, for
whom ‘non-war–industries–committees’ would have been a more suitable title; but it applies only to the larger firms of Russia.
* Liability to military service extended in Russia between the ages of twenty-one and forty-three. Men would serve three years in the line; then they would be liable for service with the 1st class of the reserve for seven years, and with the 2nd class for eight. This would be followed by three years’ liability for service with the 1st class of the territorials (opolcheniye). Most exemptees served in its second class, in so far as they had to serve at all.
* The English encountered a smaller problem in this than other, more traditionalist countries, for middle-class women could work without demeaning themselves as much as in France or Germany. Middle-class women invaded the bureaucracy, and emancipation of women in England tended to mean paying wives with the money they extracted, in the form of taxes, from their husbands.
* Under Marushevski, Diederichs, Lokhvitski and Bobrikov. Some of these troops later took a rôle in the unrest of the French army in 1917, and there was also trouble in Salonica. Some were repatriated; others were sent to the Sahara for penal service unless they agreed to serve with the Whites.
* He informed Zhilinski, for the allies’ benefit, that the Russian army would have a front-line strength in April of 2,750,000. The French had, correctly, estimated it at 1,500,000; and Zhilinski was much embarrassed when they showed him their source—a telegram from Paléologue, their ambassador, quoting a Russian war ministry source. Zhilinski, to prevent further publication, ‘without ceremony took the telegram, hid it in my wallet and refused to discuss it.’
* By 1917, the pressure was such that the Bank did not have time to cut and number its notes before handing them out. Money was handed over bank-counters in printed sheets containing several notes, which the customer then cut; the Treasury pushed its own ‘short-term obligations’ onto suppliers, as payment; and the United States government was officially asked, in 1917, to undertake printing of Russian money, on the grounds that the Russian printers were disgruntled and strike-prone.6
* Even in England, which was well-organised, government met the same problem with farmers. Direct taxes (including an income-tax that took 6/- in the £ of incomes above £135) were levied on farmers with a rule-of-thumb that their profits would be twice their rent. Not many farmers objected to this rule-of-thumb.8
* In England, direct taxation accounted for a quarter of government revenue in 1917 and 1918.
* Some nobles responded meanly against their remaining labour-force. The Olsufievs took back six cows they had given to their labourers; Prince V. F. Gagarin cut by half the flour ration he gave them; Prince Lvov—of Provisional Government fame—cut back his present of potatoes by six-sevenths.15
* The word ‘kulak’ (fist) is traditionally applied to these people, as a token of their unpopularity with most peasants. It is a misnomer. ‘Kulak’ meant village usurer, like gombeen-man’ in Ireland. He might also of course own land, but only incidentally. Prosperous peasants were simply known to the peasants as ‘prosperous peasants’.
* The anti-semitic ‘Black Hundreds’ opened their own bread-shops.
Table of Contents
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Maps
Author’s Note
Introduction to the Penguin Edition
Introduction
THE EASTERN FRONT 1914–1917
CHAPTER ONE: The Army and the State in Tsarist Russia
CHAPTER TWO: The Military Imperative, July 1914
CHAPTER THREE: The Opening Round: East Prussia
CHAPTER FOUR: The Opening Round: Galicia
CHAPTER FIVE: The First War-Winter, 1914–1915
CHAPTER SIX: The Austro-Hungarian Emergency
CHAPTER SEVEN: The Shell-Shortage, 1915
CHAPTER EIGHT: The Retreat, 1915
CHAPTER NINE: The Political War-Economy, 1914–1917
CHAPTER TEN: The Second War-Winter, 1915–1916
CHAPTER ELEVEN: Summer, 1916
CHAPTER TWELVE: The Romanian Campaign, 1916–1917
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: War and Revolution, 1917
Notes
Index
Footnotes
Introduction
Page 13
CHAPTER THREE: The Opening Round: East Prussia
Page 53
CHAPTER FIVE: The First War-Winter, 1914–1915
Page 95
Page 99
Page 114
CHAPTER SIX: The Austro-Hungarian Emergency
Page 124
CHAPTER SEVEN: The Shell-Shortage, 1915
Page 144
Page 149
Page 151
Page 155
Page 159
Page 160
Page 163
CHAPTER EIGHT: The Retreat, 1915
Page 169
Page 170
Page 187
CHAPTER NINE: The Political War-Economy, 1914–1917
Page 197
Page 200
Page 204
CHAPTER TEN: The Second War-Winter, 1915–1916
Page 214
Page 219
Page 220
Page 221
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: War and Revolution, 1917
Page 288
Page 289
Page 290
Page 293
Page 294
Page 297