World War One: A Short History

by Norman Stone

  Falkenhayn had had two main concerns. The first was to persuade Russia to abandon the war, and he needed some demonstration that she would never win it. The second was to persuade the Austro-Hungarians that they should make generous concessions to Italy, so as to fend off her intervention. This was difficult; if he told them that he proposed to send direct help, with a view to defeating Russia, then he might encourage them to refuse the Italian concessions. The preparations for an attack on Russia were therefore concealed even from Conrad, and the Kaiser himself was only told of the plan on 11 April. It was a good plan – an attack by a new army (the Eleventh) across rolling countryside north of the Carpathians, in the passes of which the Russians were attempting offensives. By now the land had dried out, and there would be no repetition of the calamitous Conrad doings in the snows. Over ten days, the eight divisions – 100,000 men and 1,000 guns – of Mackensen’s new Eleventh Army arrived east of Cracow by the end of April – the kind of railway performance of which Russians, especially, were not capable.

  They arrived at a very sensitive spot, an area where the Russians’ difficulties with war goods were compounded by a very messy strategic situation: their entire position was about to explode. The Russian army consisted of two Army Groups (or fronty). The North-western one had to deal with the Germans in East Prussia, who could attack south, east, even north, into the Baltic provinces. A cautious commander would have to keep men ready to defend any of these, which left nothing spare for an attack. The South-western front equally naturally worried about threats to the long Carpathian flank, and in any case thought, understandably, that a certain effort would put Austria-Hungary out of the war. The problem on the Russian side especially was that the troops’ movements were extraordinarily slow, because their railway system was considerably less advanced than the German, and there was almost no central railway direction beyond a middle-ranking officer with two assistants sitting in half of a railway carriage in a forest clearing at Baranowicze. About one fifth of German railway movement was to do with horses (especially fodder), but more than one half on the Russian side, partly because cavalry and Cossacks were still expecting their hour of glory. But in any case, the fronty managed their own railway movements, ignored Stavka, and did not put each other’s claims first. It could take a month for an army corps to be shifted, although in theory the journey from Riga to Odessa could have been done in five days.

  Two thirds of the entire strength, sixty divisions, catered for North-western phobias about East Prussia. The commander of the South-western Army Group (Ivanov) was assembling a large force (six army corps) for an action close to the Romanian border, in the eastern Carpathians – the aim, of course, to bring in Romania and Italy at the same time. Most Russian troops to the west of this were supposed to keep on in the Carpathian passes, and the result was that the front east of Cracow was thinly held, by five divisions, with no reserves within easy reach, and a sketchy front line, some desultory earth-shifting and not much wire. Russian soldiers disliked digging in ground that had been fought over, because, in the thaw, corpses surfaced. The local commander heard that German troops were arriving, and wanted to build a reserve position. He was told that, if he had men to spare for that sort of work, he must have more than he needed, and was told to part with some. Communications to the front line even ran over open ground. Everything, strategic and tactical, was in place for one of the great disasters of Russian military history.

  On 2 May the eighteen divisions and thousand guns of the Austrian Fourth and German Eleventh Armies began a bombardment lasting four hours, which quite soon reduced the Russian positions to rubble and could not be answered, most of the Russian Third Army’s artillery being elsewhere (and even the commander, though forewarned by deserters, had gone off to a celebration of the St George Order). Many of the troops were raw or even over-age, and some panicked at the trench mortars, running away, greatcoats flapping, over open ground; one third of the defenders were wiped out, and a gap of five miles opened in the Russian line. In two days the Central Powers’ troops moved eight miles. Only an immediate Russian retreat to the river San and Przemysl might have saved something, but the Third Army was ordered to hold on, local reserves vanished into the defeat, and by 10 May the Austro-Germans had taken 200 guns and 140,000 prisoners. Now, the Russians had to pull back from the Carpathians, and reserves from the other front were sent tardily, reluctantly, and in bits and pieces. Besides, another sinister factor was starting to tell: the Russians did not have sufficient munitions – one corps, needing 20,000 shells at once and 25,000 every day thereafter, could only be sent 15,000. By 19 May the Germans had a bridgehead over the San, and when Falkenhayn met the chief of staff of the Eleventh Army, Hans von Seeckt, at Jaroslaw on the river, the two men agreed that an enormous opportunity was opening up: the whole of Russian Poland might be taken. The commander of the Russian South-west front agreed, sending panic-stricken messages that he would have to retreat as far as Kiev. Meanwhile, he had to retreat eccentrically – between north and east, not quite knowing which route the Central Powers would follow. On 4 June Przemysl was re-taken, and on the 22nd Lvov itself.

  There followed a vast crisis on the Russian front. The great battering-ram in Galicia now moved towards the southern side of Russian Poland, and in mid July the Germans in East Prussia assembled another battering-ram for the northern side. There was a further complication, in that the Germans had opened another front, on the Baltic. In mid April they had sent cavalry into the open spaces there, and had drawn in more Russian troops than the area was worth; an Army had to cover Riga, another Lithuania, and a new front, the Northern, was opened up, giving the usual headaches as to the disposal of reserves. The Russian strategic position was a very poor one, and the sensible thing would have been to give up Poland altogether. However, the rare voice to that effect was easily silenced. In the first place, evacuating Warsaw would require 2,000 trains, and these could not be spared because of the requirements of fodder. There was another argument. Poland was supposed to be protected by the great fortresses – Kovno in the north, Novogeorgievsk outside Warsaw, the very symbol of Russian rule, and lesser ones elsewhere, on various rivers. These fortresses had been very expensive before the war, and contained thousands of guns, with millions of rounds of shell. Why just abandon them?

  The Russian army would therefore stand and fight. Shell-shortage had been brought about, not really by the terrible backwardness of the country (as Stalin and emigrant generals, all seeking excuses for their misdeeds, asserted) but by wrong-headedness. The War Ministry had never thought Russian industrialists honest or competent. The Artillery Department of the Ministry thought that the infantry were producing hard-luck stories. Foreigners were invited to supply shell, but Russia came at the end of everyone’s list, sent specifications in measurements as obsolete as the cubit, and anyway could not directly pay (she used British credit). But the fact remains that two million shells had been stockpiled in the great fortresses, which now collapsed. In mid July, Gallwitz, with a thousand guns and 400,000 shells from the north, and Mackensen from the south, bombarded their way forward, sometimes reducing Russian army corps to a few thousand men, and by 4 August the Germans had taken Warsaw. The fortress of Novogeorgievsk had a large garrison, with 1,600 guns and a million shells. It should have been evacuated, given the fate of every other fortress in Europe faced with heavy artillery, but as the front commander, Alexeyev, opined, ‘spiritual motives speak for its defence’. Beseler, conqueror of the fortress of Antwerp, arrived with a siege train. He captured the chief engineer of the fortress, doing the rounds with all of his maps. A single German shell blew up one of the forts, and the place surrendered on 19 August. At the same moment, the same fate occurred to the other great fortress, Kovno, which was supposed to defend Lithuania, and where there was a similar vast haul of 1,300 guns and 900,000 shells.

  As the Turkish proverb has it, one disaster is worth a thousand pieces of advice, and Stavka at last did the right thing. It re
treated – a version of 1812, complete with scorched-earth tactics, leaving nothing behind for the Germans to use. From the military viewpoint, the retreat was managed well enough, Brest-Litovsk being burned, with hundreds of thousands of refugees trudging away from the Jewish Pale and crowding into the cities. The Germans outran their own supplies, even of water, as they plodded ahead into the marshlands of the Pripyat. Because Stavka overrated the German threat to Riga, the retreat proceeded in different directions. On 18 September the Germans stole through the ‘Sventsiany gap’ and managed to take Vilna, capital of Lithuania. Ludendorff wanted to go on, but Falkenhayn had some sense of reality. The Russians had lost a million prisoners, and would clearly be in no position to interfere with German plans elsewhere; in any case, as a technician, Falkenhayn well understood the difficulties of supplying armies in White Russia, far beyond the German railheads, without metalled roads, and dependent on a barely functioning Russian railway that had a broader gauge unusable by German locomotives. A priority now was to knock out Serbia and to establish a land route to Turkey, before the Balkan winter set in. He waved aside Austro-Hungarian plans concerning the Ukraine and Italy, and sent Mackensen to the Balkans. The Bulgarian government had their own ambitions, to reconstitute the medieval Bulgarian empire, and Bulgaria was strategically placed to invade Serbia from the east. She was overwhelmed in October–November, and on 1 January 1916, the first direct train from Berlin arrived in Istanbul.

  NOTES

  1. A Colonel Doughty-Wylie, on the Staff, went ashore armed with only a cane. He had been Military Consul (part of an early international effort at peace-keeping in south-eastern Anatolia), had taken part, with the Red Crescent, in the Balkan Wars on the Ottoman side, and been decorated. He said that he was not going to kill Turks, was himself killed, and was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross.

  FOUR • 1916

  preceding pages: British gasmasked machine-gun unit on the Somme, 1916

  In December 1915 the Allies held a military conference at French General Headquarters, in the palace of the Princes de Condeá, at Chantilly. The year had gone badly for them. However, 1916 promised much better: the Russians had overcome their munitions crisis, and the British were producing a land army; they were also financing the imports (mainly from the USA) which were so vital for the Allied war effort. Falkenhayn could tell that time was not on Germany’s side. He could also see that Britain was the key enemy: she would fight on, unless somehow France could be made to ask for peace. Germany still had an advantage in terms of munitions-output, so the obvious target was the French army, and the obvious method was artillery – competently used, it caused three quarters of all casualties. The German superiority in it was still substantial, and it needed to be used in a place where the French would have no alternative but to stand and be battered. That in turn was obvious – Verdun. Here was a historic place, a fortress dominating the heights of the Meuse, north-east of Paris, which had acted as hinge of the French army in the Battle of the Marne and had a place in the mythology of France greater than that of Ypres in the mythology of England. It would have to be defended, though its defenders, given the terrain, could be shelled to pieces.

  Such was Falkenhayn’s thinking, and in some ways it made sense. There was a German salient at St Mihiel, to the south, from which Verdun’s communications could be bombarded, and if he took the heights east of the river, his guns could bombard Verdun itself. German communications were much better than the defenders’, which consisted mainly of a single winding and uphill road. Besides, the winter mists and the forests meant that an attack could gain surprise, and air superiority had been attained. The French would have to counterattack in exceedingly unfavourable circumstances, had already suffered greatly during Joffre’s doings in 1915, and would be bled to death. The Fifth Army was placed under the command of the Crown Prince, with a von der Schulenburg, from one of the historic Prussian military dynasties, as chief of staff, and matters began as Falkenhayn had foreseen. Verdun had been quiet, and French positions had not been properly prepared. Inspection in January created some alarm, and the generals would probably just have abandoned the position, but the politicians supervened, and said that the glory of France forbade withdrawal. The Crown Prince needed to muster only nine divisions, because the essentials lay with the artillery – 1,300 munitions trains in seven weeks. There was a delay, caused by weather conditions, and this allowed French preparations to be intensified – perhaps decisively. On 21 February 1,220 guns, half of them heavy or high-trajectory, fired off two million shells in eight hours on an eight-mile front. In the first three days, the Germans advanced several miles, with new tactics and new weaponry, such as flamethrowers. The symbol of the battle was a great fort, Douaumont, which the French had had the sense to abandon (its concrete was extremely thick, but of course it made an obvious target for the heaviest of guns, though, after its capture, it was a French gun that smashed it). The Germans took it in a lucky probe, the French having opted to use trenches outside it.

  But Falkenhayn’s ideas were defective. Two million shells could of course obliterate anything living on an eight-mile front, but the front was not long enough to deal with the French on the west bank of the Meuse, and they fired at the flank of the Germans advancing on the right bank. The defending commander, Philippe Pétain, knew what he was about, and German momentum slowed. Falkenhayn had to try and deal with the left bank problem, and in the meantime on the right bank had to fend off suicidal counter-attacking by a general determined to make his name, Nivelle. The French did not collapse – quite the contrary – and the decisive heights east of the Meuse, after Douaumont, were not taken. Meanwhile, Verdun became transformed into a national epic, something like the Battle of Britain in 1940, and France was galvanized. Public opinion was whipped up on both sides, and Falkenhayn’s limited aims were forgotten.

  Three quarters of a million casualties ensued, French and German. The single road, the ‘sacred way’ as it was rather blasphemously named, was improvised, and lorries went by every fourteen seconds, at night, their lights dimmed, to supply the Verdun line. French divisions were rotated, almost all of them spending two weeks at least in line. Falkenhayn realized that he would have to silence the artillery on the western bank of the Meuse, and in March and April he concentrated his efforts there. He himself would probably have preferred to break off the operation, but it had become a matter of prestige, the Kaiser himself visiting to celebrate the fall of Fort Douaumont, and urging on his son. The Germans did capture two of the western heights – Mort Homme and Côte 304– and then turned their attention to the east bank again, in May and June, taking Fort Vaux, but this had not been the point of the exercise at all – it had been the French who were supposed to do the attacking. To begin with, French losses had been much greater than German, but now the figures were equalized. When on 23 June the final great German effort came, it was too weak to prevail. Thereafter, the energetic new commander, General Nivelle, organized well-planned counter-strokes, re-taking the forts (there is a scene in Renoir’s great film La Grande illusion when the French prisoners of war go mad, shouting ‘Douaumont est à nous’). Verdun also gave France a slogan, ‘ils ne passeront pas’. But in a sense it broke the French army, or at any rate strained it to such a degree that the country never really recovered: France’s last moment as a Great Power. When she did fall in 1940, this was partly because her people did not want to go through Verdun again.

  Perhaps, if Falkenhayn had helped the Austrians, Italy might have been knocked out of the war, and that was the Austrian aim. In mid May, the Austrians attacked from the Trentino, hoping to break out onto the Venetian plain, and even cut off the whole Italian army on the Isonzo, north-east of Venice. It was a very bold plan, and in weather that was still wintry the Austrians performed prodigies, hauling heavy guns with ski-lift cable cars. This gave them a threefold advantage in heavy artillery, and by shifting six of his best divisions from the eastern front, Conrad gained a slight superiority. With
in days the Austrians were near the edge of the plateau, but as usual the defenders’ communications were better, while the attackers were exhausted; reserves came up by Fiat lorries, for counterattack. This was the only real might-have-been in the war. If Falkenhayn had supported Conrad, then Italy could easily have been knocked out altogether, with dramatic consequences for the other fronts. The option was never seriously considered; Falkenhayn did not even tell Conrad about his plans, nor did Conrad tell Falkenhayn: the two men were on very bad terms.

  There was one decisive battle on the Russian front – decisive in the sense that it deprived most Russian generals of their stomachs. They had to do something, according to the Chantilly agreements, to assist the French over Verdun. On 18 March, in White Russia, near Lake Narotch, the northern Russian armies therefore began an offensive, reckoning, with some justification, that earlier supply problems had been overcome. It was a copy-book example of how not to do things. The troops were marched over snow, easily spotted by German aircraft; even the cooks in headquarters were discussing when the offensive would take place. The thaw had begun: icy mud during the day, frozen mud during the night, which meant that shell was either swamped or it bounced off. On top of everything else, there was a row between light artillerists and heavy artillerists, with no cooperation, and the initial bombardment was ineffective, dismissed as ‘General Smirnov’s son et lumière’. After 100,000 casualties and no gains, the attack was called off – probably, and with considerable competition, the worst-managed battle of the entire war. Educated Russia was starting to look on the Tsarist establishment with derision. The press department of Stavka was run by a Mikhail Lemke, the translator of Hegel, and his diaries, published in 1918, are a record of mockery – General Smirnov, far too old, appointed because some painted old granny had intrigued at the court, General Bezobrazov, pop-eyed and log-legged, even worse. General Kuropatkin thought up a wheeze by which, in the middle of the night, searchlights would suddenly be switched on, supposedly to dazzle the Germans. It had not occurred to him that the attackers would be silhouetted and be easy targets. He was dismissed. However, the Tsar, to spare his feelings, did not want him to think that he had been sacked for being too old; he was kindly told that he had just been incompetent, and was replaced by someone even older. Lemke titters in disbelief, but a much greater disaffection was under way. After Lake Narotch, the Russian northern armies did next to nothing for a full year and a half – bored, badly fed, drinking on empty stomachs foul stuff brewed in secret: the very prescription for a mutiny, which was duly to happen on an enormous scale.