by Norman Stone
With one of his armies proceeding in the wrong direction, Conrad now reinstated the original plan for deployment in southern Poland. But the railway timetables again could not be improvised, and three other armies were detrained in the Carpathian stations, having then to be marched forward for a hundred miles in August heat. The other army – the Second – did get out on the Serbian border, stayed in tents for a while, became sucked into a failed action, and was then reloaded and taken across southern Hungary, arriving in Galicia nearly five weeks after the war had started. Once there it did not flourish. The first consequence of all this was that the grandly proclaimed offensive against Serbia failed. The commander, Potiorek – a neurotic homosexual and Conrad’s rival, with good court connections – communicated with his chief of staff only on barely readable notes and was smarting from his failure to protect the Archduke. Moving over almost trackless mountains, slightly inferior in number to the Serbs and, unlike them, entirely inexperienced in war, the two Austro-Hungarian armies were too widely separated. The left-hand one was overwhelmed (16–19 August), causing both to withdraw. Other efforts, up to December, similarly failed.
On the north-eastern front, two Austro-Hungarian armies were ready by 21 August, somewhat before the Russians, and there were engagements on the northern border with Russian Poland, where the Austrians did quite well, forcing back two Russian armies at more or less the same moment as the Germans captured most of the Eighth Army. However, the success was gained at the expense of the eastern part of this front. Here, one Austro-Hungarian army, the Third, stood on a river not far from the Russian border, and the missing Second army from Serbia came in only on 8 September. Overall, the Russian superiority of numbers was 750,000 to 500,000, with proportions even greater in artillery and machine guns; and that superiority had been concentrated on the eastern side. The single Austro-Hungarian army made matters worse for itself by attacking, and it was soon overwhelmed, the Russians entering the provincial capital, Lvov (German name Lemberg, by which this battle is known overall), on 3 September. Austro-Hungarian counter-strokes failed, and a general retreat was ordered, to the Carpathian foothills and the outskirts of Cracow, far to the west.
The war’s pattern had been set: in the west a stalemate, and in the east a more or less constant Austro-Hungarian crisis. How should Germany, her resources only now being properly mobilized, respond? Moltke’s nerves had collapsed, and he was replaced by a less hysterical figure, the Prussian minister of war, Erich von Falkenhayn. At first, there was no particular reason to panic. There had been enormous losses but, even so, troops would simply be brought back to the right level of numbers and they would try again. By now, it was clear enough that if troops attacked frontally, they would be met by a hail of shell and small-arms fire from positions in the ground that guns could not easily deal with. Both sides in France therefore tried moving into what was still an open flank, north-west of the Aisne lines, one of the oldest manoeuvres in warfare, because attackers on a flank could fire from the side at unprotected defenders who would be ‘enfiladed’, i.e. caught in a vulnerable line that would not be able to fire back. The trouble was that the attackers in these cases were not able to move fast enough, and there was also a lack of artillery. From mid September the clashes went on, further and further to the northwest, resulting in trench-lines that finally reached the sea on the coast of Flanders. The medieval town of Ypres was defended by the British against a formidable German attack, designed to clear Belgium altogether, as new troops came in on the German side raised principally from the oldest school pupils and from student volunteers. In late October and the first half of November, a very bloody battle went on, the British holding grimly on to the town and the subsequently famous area of ‘the Ypres salient’. A salient was a part of the line that jutted out into enemy territory, and defenders were exceedingly vulnerable to fire from three sides. It would have been sensible to withdraw to a safer position, but public opinion had been whipped up to such an extent that such withdrawals would have been seen as a confession of defeat. The battle cost each side 130,000 casualties. It marked the end of the old British regular army (60,000), and the Belgians lost a third of their remaining army. For the Germans it was the ‘massacre of the innocents’, these hardly trained student volunteers whose units in some cases lost 60 per cent of their strength. They have 25,000 graves in the German cemetery at Langemarck.
Both sides started to develop the trench-lines, and they became more and more formidable. The front-line troops lived in ‘dug-outs’, underground dormitories and storehouses that were built into the trench-wall facing the enemy, for protection from shelling. Belts of barbed wire were placed in front of the line, which was also constructed in such a way as to avoid enfilading fire, i.e. in a zig-zag. Communications trenches, also zig-zagging their way back to a safer area with hospitals and supplies, were needed, and in time several lines of trenches might be dug, in case of retreat. In wet weather the trenches became very muddy, and duck-boards were used; there was also a great problem with vermin – rats fed on the corpses, and lice flourished in uniforms (a Turkish practice of placing a jacket on an ant-hill was followed, because the ants ate the lice, though their own stings were formidable). This situation of stalemate marked the entire western front by mid November 1914. In military terms it was not entirely new. In the past, besiegers and besieged had often held each other off for months, and Marlborough’s campaigns in much the same territory had been very slow-moving. What was new about the situation of 1914 was its scale: millions of men, far better supplied and cared for than troops of the past, were completely immobilized in lines that were perhaps a hundred yards apart. On the whole, the Germans held the high ground and were therefore able to dig deeper before reaching the water-table, which in Flanders was quite close to the surface, the whole place having been rescued from the sea by competent medieval drainage. British troops, untrained volunteers, stumbled around in the sticky mud that was so well remembered as the main feature of the British part of the western front.
In the east, conditions were somewhat different. The front, almost a thousand miles, was twice as long, but there were fewer troops. In theory, Russia should have been able to draw upon countless millions of men, her population of 170 million being almost twice that of Germany and Austria-Hungary put together. But conscripts cost money, and the Russian war budget could not stretch to feeding and clothing more than a quarter of the available manpower. Men were therefore exempted on various grounds – religion, physical standards, drawing the long straw in a lottery. The largest exemption occurred because of ‘family status’. If a man was a ‘breadwinner’ he did not join the army. Early in August, 2 million peasants got married, to the bewilderment of the War Ministry, which could only imagine that they intended to do their patriotic duty by producing children. The Russian first-line army, at 5 million, was no greater than the German, and on the eastern front there were generally some ninety Russian divisions to some eighty German and Austro-Hungarian ones. There were 1,500 Russians per mile of front, as against 5,000 Frenchmen, and the latter were much better armed. There was more. In the west, there were railways to transport men relatively quickly to some threatened part of the front. In Russian Poland, such railways were far fewer, and the movement of reserves was always a difficult business: at one stage, in October 1914, the High Command more or less lost a whole army, milling around the streets of Warsaw. In these circumstances, the eastern war remained one of movement, though the movement itself was generally meaningless.
In mid September the Germans realized that they would have to do something to save their ally’s position. Ludendorff came to see Conrad, and at this stage, as a north German farmer’s son, he was still easily awed by the grandeur of the Habsburgs, the more so as Austro-Hungarian headquarters had been moved away from the barracks of Przemysl to considerably more comfortable arrangements on a small estate at Teschen belonging to the nominal commander, Archduke Friedrich, and his wife, a Princess Croy (known as ‘B
usabella’). He charged rent for its use, and Conrad himself was from time to time preoccupied with organizing a Hungarian and Protestant divorce for the love of his life, whom he could not have married under Austrian (and Catholic) law. Conrad persuaded Ludendorff that the Austro-Hungarian army was in its then dreadful condition because it had been holding off the Russians so that Germany would win in the west. The condition was indeed dreadful. It had lost half a million men, 100,000 of them captured, and Przemysl, the great fortress on the northern slopes of the Carpathians, had been shut in, with a garrison of 120,000. No doubt it could have collapsed, as every other fortress did, but the mud all around was so thick that the Russians could not manoeuvre their heavy artillery, of which, in any event, they had too little. Still, there was clearly an Austro-Hungarian emergency, and a German army with Ludendorff in charge was moved to positions north of Cracow. There followed two months of manoeuvring, not unimpressive on the map, but leading nowhere. Ludendorff said that he would have done better had he had more troops.
However, Falkenhayn had to consider much more than the east. Early in November, the war took on a properly worldwide scale. Its origins had had much to do with the position of the Ottoman empire, in fact the entire Middle East, including Persia. Turkey in general was seen as backward, ripe for takeover by the Europeans, who had a new-found interest in the oil of Mesopotamia (Iraq); the Christian minorities might be used as their agents. One or two men who knew the Turks understood that they were not at all a write-off, but not many had such understanding. In 1914, Churchill commandeered two battleships being built in Newcastle, on public subscription, for the Turkish navy. Two German battleships, Goeben and Breslau, reached Turkish waters, and adopted Turkish service: public opinion in Turkey became very pro-German. But in any case a pro-German element had seized control of Turkey. Enver Pasha, the Minister of War, and nephew-in-law of the Sultan, was producing, along with other ‘Young Turks’, a species of nationalism. Its model was French revolutionary and the ‘Young Turks’ followed the victorious Balkan-Christian states: a new language, a new interpretation of history, an exclusively national future. Enver and his closest colleague, Talat, Minister of the Interior, tricked their own government into war. Formally they took over the two German ships and, with crews wearing fezzes and pretending to be Turks, bombarded Russian ports in the expectation that the Russians would declare war. They did, early in November, and much of the Ottoman cabinet resigned in protest at Enver’s provocation. But Turkey had entered the war. Enver invaded Russia, via the Caucasus, and suffered an enormous reverse – 100,000 of his men died from disease or cold in the high plateau around Sarikamiş. A German commander, Kress von Kressenstein, suffered another reverse at Suez. To Enver, this did not really matter: a Turkish nation would be born in the suffering, and it would look to Turkey proper rather than to the Arabic world. This calculation was, in the outcome, successful, though it cost Turkey one quarter of her population and was carried out, not by Enver, but by a much greater man, his rival Kemal Atatürk.
NOTES
1. At a more mundane level but expressing the same illusion, the Prague journalist Egon Erwin Kisch declined his mother’s offer of spare underwear as he went off to the front: did she think it was going to be a Thirty Years War?
2. The surname is ‘Conrad’, by which he is properly called. ‘Von Hötzendorf’ is an addition, a predicate indicating nobility.
THREE • 1915
preceding pages: French 220 cannon on the Western Front, 1915
As the Ypres fighting died away and a winter freeze gripped the east, the British took stock. How was this war to be won? History was supposed to be a guide, and here the lessons were clear enough. In Napoleonic times, there had been a strategy to take account of British strengths and French weaknesses. The Royal Navy operated a blockade of French trade with the outside world, and throttled it. Brest, Bordeaux, Toulon withered on the vine, and the French influence on the world collapsed. Substitute industries, taking a great deal of money, were promoted by Napoleon, but they were not efficient, and the French economy was distorted, while French dependencies resented the blackmail of buying indifferent goods at high prices. Meanwhile, since the British monopolized overseas trade, they made a great deal of money, and they could present this, as loans, to Austrians and Russians who did the land fighting. In time, they themselves could mount a considerable military force in the furthest-flung part of Napoleon’s empire, Spain – 80,000 men, by the standards of the time a large force, supplied by sea whereas the French had to supply their own response up hill and down dale over the most barren and difficult part of Europe, beset by bandits of great determination and savagery. Our word guerrilla – ‘little war’ – comes from this time. It was not in reality so ‘little’. The British and the Spaniards and the Portuguese mounted an effort that was very considerable, but it was five years before the French were cleared from Spain. Napoleon called it ‘the Spanish ulcer’, draining his strength, but it was more than an ulcer: it was two Atlantic empires, even three if you include Portugal, against him.
Now, with enormous British naval superiority, was there not some way round the stalemate in the west? Bright sparks wondered, especially Winston Churchill, with his extraordinary quickness and imagination, his wit, his old-fashioned grand accent, his sense of English history. The navy, under his direction as First Lord of the Admiralty – a singularity of British history was that civilians controlled the armed forces, whereas in Germany they took their orders from the military – had mobilized early. Eighteen miles of grey battleships resulted, bow to stern, a sign to the Germans that, if this went on, they would collapse. In fact the first shots fired in the Anglo-German war were in Sydney Harbour Bay, in Australia, when, on 4 August, a German trader tried to leave and was warned off. A blockade of Germany was declared. However, Churchill’s historical sense was deceptive in this case.
The chief aim was to stop German exports. Maurice Hankey – Kurt Riezler’s equivalent in the British machine before 1914, a formidable man, a linguist interested in everything, manager of government business at the highest level, and also responsible like Riezler for the nuclear bomb twenty years later (German Jewish exiles delivered the secret to him in 1940, and he passed it on to the Americans) – said that Germany would be destroyed if her exports were stopped. Here he was, like many other clever people, quite wrong. Nine hundred German merchantmen were picked up, and the Royal Navy (not without trouble) picked up various enemy warships around the world, including the Falkland Islands. However, if Germany were prevented from exporting, the spare machinery and labour simply went into war work. There were no riots in Hamburg – on the contrary, the great trusts which ran German industry went over to the production of war goods, the banks which were their own creatures financed this, and the Prussian War Ministry knew how to maintain quality control without getting in the way, as its British counterpart did. The effect of the British block on German exports was therefore that the German war economy did better than all others in 1915. The Russians took a year to catch up.
There was another paradox to the blockade: it became a wonderful alibi for bad management of food supplies in Germany. The British were greatly hated, blamed for scarcities that were not truly of their making. Stopping German imports was not easy because they could go through neutral ports, and in any case international law (the Declaration of London in 1909) did not allow for stoppages of food imports (even barbed wire counted only as ‘conditional contraband’ because it had agricultural uses). Under the British rules, neutral ships were supposed to be open for inspection, and sometimes their cargo was confiscated, which, again and again, made for problems with the USA – problems uneasily resolved by offers of postwar compensation. But there was no real way of stopping food imports through (especially) Holland.
It was true that, as the war went on, German food supplies declined, in the winter of 1916–17 quite drastically. The blockade was blamed for this. But the price-control system had more to do wi
th it: grain was controlled, and meat was not, so farmers fed grain to their beasts. In fact grain, directly eaten, gives four times more energy than if eaten indirectly through meat (the two-pound Victorian loaf was enough for a working man’s day). Then in Germany meat prices were controlled, such that the beasts were slaughtered (9 million pigs in the spring of 1915), rather than sold. There was less manure and thence a smaller harvest. Matters were made worse by the failure of the potato crop, and the winter of 1916–17 was known as ‘the turnip winter’, but the heart of the problem lay in blundering price-controls. The Prussian ministry of agriculture seems to have regarded the blockade as just a heightened form of the agricultural tariff which the Right had always advocated. At any rate, peasants did quite well, while the towns ate turnips and endlessly boiled sugar beet to produce a sweet syrup, which is still eaten with potato-cakes – Reibekuchen mit Rübenkraut – at Christmas markets in Cologne.
There was another somewhat perverse effect of the blockade, this time one that had been foreseen but misunderstood. As German exports went down, British ones were expected to take their place: the Latin American market could be recaptured, or so it was supposed. Profits from such exports could be recycled, via war loans or taxation, to the Treasury, and that in turn would mean lending money to allies, such as Italy or Russia, who would do the land fighting. There was, again, some precedent for this: in the Seven Years War of 1756–63, British money had kept Frederick the Great’s Prussia going against France, Russia and Austria, while the British liquidated almost all of the French empire. Now, exports did rise – in 1916–17 to a value of £527,000,000, as against an average of £474,000,000 in the five years before the war. That figure was not equalled until 1951, and it is a curious fact that 1916 was the only year in the whole of statistically recorded time when the British sold more goods overseas than they bought. However, exports took skilled labour, diverting it (and machinery) from war work, and the whole business was bedevilled by another phenomenon characteristic of the time, that vast numbers of the skilled men volunteered for the army, so exporters faced labour-shortage and bid against each other with ever-higher wages. This problem was solved, only partially, when conscription was imposed in 1916: under conscription, exemptions could be made for essential crafts (to the extent that conscription in the end netted fewer men than the earlier volunteering had done). In 1915 these confusions affected the British war economy, and there was a serious lack of munitions in the spring and summer, whereas the Germans had been forced into a more appropriate approach. Blockade therefore turned into a set of elliptical billiard balls, and was not really properly used until 1918, when the various neutrals, mainly because of American intervention, could be coerced into limiting their trade with Germany.