A World Undone

by G. J. Meyer

  Five days after the start of this offensive, Ludendorff, once again at Hindenburg’s headquarters, kicked off an attack in the north. In doing so he introduced something new in warfare: gas. The Germans began their assault The Eastern Front in winter by opening eighteen thousand canisters of xylyl bromide, a kind of tear gas that was supposed to be carried by the wind into the Russian lines and incapacitate the defenders without killing them. They had not understood, however, that xylyl bromide is ineffective in freezing temperatures. Thus it had so little impact that the Russians scarcely noticed it—never told the British and French of having encountered it. The advance by the German infantry, when it came, made modest initial gains and then was stopped by stiff resistance. Ludendorff, sensibly, called it off. He had accomplished his objective, which was simply to keep the Russians engaged while preparations were finalized for a more important effort on another part of the northeastern front. Engaged they certainly were. Counterattacks by eleven Russian divisions took back all the ground that Ludendorff’s offensive had gained—ground of no importance—at a cost of forty thousand casualties in three days. German losses were light: their infantry conducted an orderly retreat while the artillery tore chunks out of the tightly massed Russian formations.

  The Eastern Front in winter

  The cold ruined plans and took countless lives.

  In a month of struggle Conrad barely managed to take the objectives he had planned to reach the first day. Przemysl remained out of reach. Soon it was the Russians who were advancing, managing for a while to push back the Austrians and Germans but at last being stopped by the same impossible weather that had ruined Conrad’s plans. But Ludendorff, in the north, was just getting started. He had positioned the German Tenth Army north of the Masurian Lakes, the Eighth to the south, and on February 5 he was ready to unleash a campaign aimed at encircling and destroying virtually all the Russian forces in the region. Though exceedingly ambitious, this plan was rendered almost feasible by the way Grand Duke Nicholas, under conflicting pressures from the generals commanding his northern and southern sectors, had deployed the Russian armies. Russia, at this time, had approximately a hundred divisions on the Eastern Front with others moving forward to join them. They also had, as the failure of Conrad’s offensive showed, a strong defensive position in Galicia. The Central Powers, by contrast, had only eighty-three divisions in the east, half of them Austro-Hungarian, many of those of questionable reliability. It is at least possible that the grand duke, by concentrating most of his forces in the north, could have overwhelmed Hindenburg and Ludendorff. But such an approach would have required forcing the generals in the south to spare troops for the fight in the north. This the grand duke would not or could not do.

  Just as Ludendorff was ready to move, heavy snow began to fall. It fell for two days, accumulating to a depth of five feet as temperatures fell to forty degrees below zero. The Germans attacked anyway. Even more incredibly, they made good progress, taking the Russians by surprise and driving them out of their defenses. Again, winter gave the fighting a specially hellish quality, made all the worse by a sudden thaw that on February 14 turned ice to ice water and frozen earth to mud. Earlier the Germans had needed as many as eighteen horses to move each of their guns forward through the snow. Now, with the guns sinking into the ground, no number of horses could move them. Soldiers became drenched with snowmelt and their own sweat, and as night fell their clothing froze hard. As in the Carpathians, men froze to death almost as often as they were shot. The battle turned into a race in which all the competitors were painfully handicapped, the Germans struggling forward to get around the Russians and encircle them, the Russians struggling to escape and abandoning trainloads of supplies.

  Things moved to a climax on February 18, when a German corps managed to fight its way through deep snow around the Forest of Augustow and seal a Russian corps inside it. The trapped Russians put up a heroic defense through three long days, allowing other units to escape, but finally they were forced to surrender. The day after that some of the escaped Russian forces, having caught their breath, managed to mount a counterattack that captured no ground of consequence but brought the German advance to an end.

  The German propagandists declared Augustow a great victory, one of Tannenbergian proportions. Ludendorff claimed that a hundred thousand soldiers and three hundred pieces of artillery had been captured. Though Russian casualties of all kinds were actually about fifty-six thousand and the number of guns taken was 185, this was a substantial success all the same. The Russians had been pushed back seventy miles. What mattered more, Grand Duke Nicholas’s plans for a springtime attack in the northeast had been wrecked beyond possibility of recovery. Hindenburg was once again Germany’s hero. The Berlin press declared him a genius, invincible, an almost godlike figure.

  But the Russian forces in the north had not been destroyed as Ludendorff had said they would be. And although in the west a penetration of seventy miles would have been an immense achievement, in the vast reaches of the east it had little importance. Even Hindenburg admitted that “we failed strategically.” In the south there was no basis upon which even to pretend that anything had been accomplished. On February 17 Conrad had tried to restart his offensive, and the result was more pointless carnage. The winter campaign, by the time it ended, added eight hundred thousand Austrian casualties to the million of 1914. In attempting to relieve Przemysl, Conrad had lost six or more times the number of men trapped there. By April, even after rushing the recruits of 1914 into the field, Austria would have only about half a million men available for the front. It was a pathetically small number for an army at war with Russia.

  Aside from all the lives lost or ruined, very little had changed. For Falkenhayn, Conrad’s campaign and the Second Battle of the Masurian Lakes (the name given to Ludendorff’s offensive) seemed a vindication. As far as he was concerned, the two ventures had proved him right not only about the folly of winter offensives but about the impossibility of defeating Russia. Every one of his warnings had turned out to be well founded. Understandably, he decided that his western strategy too would turn out to be the right one.

  Background: The Machinery of Death

  THE MACHINERY OF DEATH

  THE GREAT WAR DID NOT END IN 1914—OR IN 1915, 1916, or 1917 for that matter—in large part because of the state of technology in the second decade of the twentieth century. The war had broken out at the end of almost a century of dizzily accelerating advances in metallurgy, chemistry, and high-precision mass production, at a moment in history when weaponry was immeasurably more advanced than it had been a few generations before. And the war itself accelerated everything still further. The nations involved were not only the world’s military giants but its industrial leaders as well. They rolled out one innovation after another year after year; whenever one side produced an implement of destruction that promised to tip the scales, the other came up with a way to preserve the deadlock.

  The armies that mustered after Sarajevo did not understand the potential of the weapons they already possessed, did not know that the tactics they had learned in school were obsolete. The stalemate could not be broken until two things happened: the generals figured out what to do with the power that the industrial revolution had placed in their hands, and they found solutions to such innovations as the machine gun and the submarine.

  It takes effort to recall, after a century that included both Kitty Hawk and men on the moon, just how slowly military technology evolved through most of human history. There was no such a thing as an effective sword until the first production of iron implements around 1200 B.C. (weaponry was pretty much a matter of clubs and spears until then), horsemen didn’t have the stirrup or the bit until the seventh century A.D., and only in the ninth century did some tinkerer in China learn to combine saltpeter, charcoal, and sulfur in proportions that turned it into a substance that exploded when touched by fire. Gunpowder didn’t reach Europe until the thirteenth century—it was brought by Mongol
invaders—and the process by which it came to be used effectively was glacially slow. The first muskets were markedly inferior to the longbow in range, in rapidity of fire, and in accuracy and killing power. They replaced the bow only because they required much less strength and skill and so could be used by almost anyone after hours instead of years of training. Napoleon’s cannons fired balls of solid iron that were not fundamentally different from the rounded chunks of stone used by Europe’s first gunners centuries before. Rifled artillery—big guns with enough range and accuracy to render obsolete the kinds of fortresses that soldiers had been building for millennia—did not appear on the scene until the time of the American Civil War.

  That—the middle of the nineteenth century—was when everything really began to change. New machine tools and new ways of casting metal made possible the manufacture of identical parts in practically infinite numbers, and so the way was cleared for the locomotive, truly modern firearms, and the internal combustion engine—for total war. The chemical industry was being born too, its pioneers discovering things that further changed the face of war. They learned that when cotton is soaked in nitric acid and allowed to dry, the result is a smokeless gunpowder far cleaner and three times more powerful than the Chinese concoction. That when nitroglycerin is mixed with absorbent earth, dynamite results. That some of the gases being synthesized for peaceful purposes were deadly when inhaled.

  From the start of hostilities in 1914, it became obvious that the very nature of combat had forever changed. The new artillery, equipped with hydraulic mechanisms for absorbing recoil, no longer had to be repositioned after every round. The “shells” fed into it, combining propellant, warhead, and a timing device in a single easily handled cylinder, could be rained down on the enemy more rapidly, more accurately, at greater range and for longer periods of time than anything seen before. For the first time in history, and from the beginning of the war to the end, artillery dominated. It did more killing between 1914 and 1918 than any other weapon.

  But it was an entirely new weapon, the machine gun, that turned the Western Front into a prolonged siege. It was invented in 1884 by an American named Hiram Maxim, whose key achievement was using the force that smokeless powder puts into a gun’s recoil and gas discharge to eject spent cartridges, reload the empty chamber, and fire again in potentially endless sequence. Maxim’s gun could pour out six hundred rounds per minute. It was a simple, sturdy mechanism that, with its barrel cooled by water, could fire at that rate for hours. Batteries of machine guns could and did turn infantry attacks into mass suicides. Their weight made the early models impractical as offensive weapons (those in use at the start of the war required crews of from three to six men), which gave an almost insuperable advantage to the defense.

  Even the rifles carried by the soldiers of the Great War were astonishing weapons in comparison with anything previously available. They varied little from country to country: the German Mauser, French Lebel, British Lee-Enfield, Austrian Männlicher, and Italian Männlicher-Carcano all were about four feet long, weighed less than ten pounds, were equipped with bolt actions, and fired metal cartridges of approximately thirty caliber fed from magazines containing between five and ten rounds. All were capable of putting bullet after bullet into a bull’s-eye at a range of hundreds of yards. In the hands of a platoon of well-trained infantry, they could put up a field of fire as lethal as any produced by a machine gun.

  Simpler innovations, some of them almost crude in technological terms, also proved to be important. Barbed wire, developed in the United States to keep cattle from breaking through fences, became an essential. On the Western Front especially, every trenchline was protected with coils of barbed wire strung between wooden uprights. Unless cleared away in advance of infantry attacks (shrapnel was the standard way of destroying wire), these coils became traps, entangling their victims within point-blank range of enemy guns.

  Rudimentary methods of underground tunneling—methods brought to the war by the coal miners of every country, and by the builders of big-city subway systems—added another dimension. Eventually scores of thousands of men on both sides would be engaged in digging under enemy defenses, either to create passageways for sneak attacks or to blow up the men, weapons, and fortifications on the surface above. Inevitably the diggers on one side, accidentally or by design, would sometimes break into the tunnels of their foes. The resulting battles under the earth, often illuminated by nothing but the flash of gunfire, were as ugly and terrifying and secret as the aircraft engagements above the earth were visible, romantic, and admired.

  Humblest of all was the lowly mortar. A kind of simple miniature howitzer capable of throwing a charge of explosives a short distance on a high trajectory, the mortar had fallen out of favor in the years before the war. The Germans had a version they called the Minenwerfer (mine thrower), but the other armies had few and the British began with none. Mortars proved to be effective in the static fighting of the Western Front—a way of lobbing an unpleasant surprise into an enemy trench—and soon the Tommies were fashioning them out of empty shells. In 1915 an Englishman named Frederick Stokes developed a more sophisticated production model, one whose teardrop-shaped projectile was equipped with stabilizing fins. In short order the “Stokes bomb” became an integral element in every company’s inventory of weapons.

  Some new things were more horrifying than effective. Poison gas, introduced by the Germans early in 1915 and thereafter used by both sides, killed thousands and left thousands disabled. It was “improved” as the war went on, chlorine being succeeded by phosgene and phosgene by mustard, but it never produced or even contributed significantly to a major victory on any front. Its deficiencies came to be so universally recognized that not even the Nazis would use it in World War II. Much the same happened with the flamethrower, introduced experimentally in 1914 and soon a standard weapon. Using pressurized gas from one tank to propel an ignited jet of oil from a second tank outward in a plume of fire as much as forty yards long, the flamethrower was terrifying in combat but otherwise of limited effectiveness. It was almost useless when used at any distance against entrenchments. And it was dangerous for its users. Operators would be engulfed in fire if a bullet penetrated both of the tanks strapped to their backs. Caught in an agonized dance of death, they might then helplessly spray fire in all directions, incinerating their own comrades.

  Flamethrowers: terrifying, but of limited effectiveness

  A war that introduced so many new weapons naturally brought others to an end. It reduced the bayonet, long the infantry’s signature weapon, to being a nearly obsolete romantic symbol. The foot soldiers of the Great War often did affix bayonets to their rifles before attacking, even to the end of the war. But they did so because they had been trained to do so and were ordered to do so; it became a largely ceremonial gesture. Men equipped with repeating rifles and face-to-face with armed enemies preferred to shoot before they got close enough to use their bayonets. They also preferred to throw grenades. When it came down to hand-to-hand combat in its most brutish form, they were more likely to use the handmade clubs they had learned to carry with them, or trenching tools with sharpened edges, or even blackjacks or brass knuckles. The number of men killed by bayonets in the war was, on the whole, very small.

  Most dramatically, the Great War brought the end of cavalry. Mounted soldiers had been a central element in offensive warfare since before the time of Alexander the Great. As a way of delivering a decisive shock to an enemy, they dominated European battlefields from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. All the armies that went to war in 1914 included huge numbers of troops on horseback—the Russians put more than a million in the field, many of them Cossacks—despite the fact that the decline in their value had begun to be apparent as early as the Civil War. On the Western Front especially, the cavalry were from the start more a burden than an asset, difficult to support and transport, and helpless when confronted with modern gunnery.

  What is shocking is t
he persistence with which the British general staff, far more than the Germans or the French, refused to reduce the size of their cavalry. Right through to the end of the war, Douglas Haig clung to the conviction that horsemen were going to be the key to exploiting infantry breakthroughs (whenever they were achieved) and that under the right circumstances (whatever they might be) his cavalry would prove a match for machine guns. It never happened.

  Chapter 14

  The Dardanelles

  “To attack Turkey would be to play the German game, and to bring about the end which Germany had in mind when she induced Turkey to join the war.”

  —FIELD MARSHAL SIR JOHN FRENCH

  In February the Twenty-ninth Infantry Division became the most important unit in the British army, not because it was the last of the prewar regular divisions to have escaped being sent to the war and wrecked there—though it was that—but because it was still in England, not committed to any theater of operations, and therefore available. It became the symbol of, and the immediate prize in, an epic tug-of-war over the direction of Britain’s war strategy.

  The struggle began with the fact that Sir John French, though his command continued to grow, was not satisfied. His certainty that the German lines opposite the BEF had to be ripe for conquest made him urgently hungry for more men. He wanted the Twenty-ninth, wanted it without delay, and could see no reason why he should be denied. He was supported by Joffre, who agreed with French about everything except how the British forces on the Western Front should be used and who should make the decision.

  Authority for the deployment of British troops lay not with French but with the war minister, Lord Kitchener. Kitchener had severely narrow ideas about what kinds of divisions should be fed into the meat-grinder of the Western Front. The so-called territorial units, which before the war had made up a kind of national guard, he regarded as third rate and parted with more or less willingly. It was the same with the colonials arriving from distant parts of the empire: Indians, Canadians, Australians, and the like. Kitchener was fiercely protective, however, of the new, still-raw divisions formed out of the men and boys who had volunteered in the first months of the conflict, and he was no less protective of the Twenty-ninth. After six months of war a division that was both intact and made up of experienced professional soldiers was a rare and precious asset. More than enough such divisions had been ravaged at Mons, Le Cateau, and Ypres, and on the Aisne.