November 1916

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Romania? The Germans had struck there precisely because it was a new, open, undefended front. An army 300,000 strong—crumbling like rotted wood. The Romanian king couldn’t wait to seize Transylvania, but was afraid of Bulgaria in his rear. He had stubbornly held out for an Allied attack from Salonika and a Russian strike across the Danube into Dobruja. What did the Allies care: just one more country to swell the rubble heap. (Careful, though, what you say about the Allies in this place!) But we ourselves—what were we thinking of? Everybody insisted that we needed a success on the main front—so we removed ourselves to a secondary one. Somebody had thought that this would put us in a stronger position, closer to the Bosphorus, but Mackensen had marched across that kingdom against our army on the Danube and turned us in the opposite direction, away from the Bosphorus. The Germans took over Romania’s oil, took over its horses. The Romanian sector? I just can’t tell you, it baffles the imagination! You can’t call it an operetta—it’s too bloody, we’re ramming in one batch of reserve units after another to plug the gap. We would need to send in at least a quarter of a million men. But the railways could get nothing through, not even ordinary hospital trains—we’re sending the wounded back in the freight cars that bring in our rations. Or on local trains, without lavatories and with broken windows. There is cholera in the Danube delta. Constantsa was surrendered just the other day.

  But they didn’t want him to talk spontaneously, just let it flow, whatever the drift of it, they wanted facts to confirm a conclusion known in advance, and nowhere better than in Petrograd: that the stupidity of the Supreme Power and the Supreme Commander was infinite, inexhaustible, and impenetrable, while the spirit of Russia’s fighting men, officers and soldiers, was unwavering, glorious, and indestructible, so that liberal progressive society could rely on them in its calculations. Whether from Romania or Galicia, they wanted from him not vivid pictures with columns of black smoke rising from shell bursts, and horses supine with their hooves in the air, they wanted anecdotes in which against the bright background of the people’s heroism the errors of the Supreme Command, and especially the ministers, would stand out like black blots, showing that it was they who were ruining everything, and that as long as the present regime existed victory was impossible.

  For the army itself this was the most natural way of relieving bad feelings: who else was reviled in officers’ bunkers if not those in the rear, GHQ, the staffs of army groups and armies, corps and division commanders! Vorotyntsev could give them as much of that as they could possibly want.

  Take for a start the fact that Russia entered the war in 1914 without the ratio of artillery pieces to bayonets prescribed by Napoleon—five to every thousand. Then, in the first weeks of what was to be a short, three-month war, regiments were rushed to the front overmanned—four officers to a company, sergeant majors at platoon level, old reservist NCOs in the ranks beside privates—because no separate count of NCOs was kept in Russia’s mobilization plan. That was how the War Ministry worked under Sukhomlinov. In those first few months so many NCOs were killed that for more than two years we had been scraping the barrel, sketchily training NCOs with little skill to command common soldiers and militiamen with none at all. Three-fifths of our regular officers had also been killed, another fifth disabled, and the remainder diluted with nongentry ensigns; with only five or six regular officers to a regiment left, how are we supposed to fight? Companies and battalions were commanded by lieutenants, or even ensigns.

  And those new ensigns? A barely literate fellow, with or without having completed elementary school, becomes “Your Honor” after four months. Where one of them may realize that he is not yet up to it and try to educate himself another will get big ideas, throw his weight around, show the soldiers who is boss. Such ensigns “from the people” had not brought officers and soldiers closer together but helped to make them strangers.

  Then again—what sort of reinforcements are we sent? The Moscow Military District, which Vorotyntsev knew well, was now commanded by the arrogant General Sandetsky, who had gotten into the idiotic habit of sending untrained soldiers to the front as quickly and in as great numbers as possible, soldiers who could neither shoot nor advance under cover. He was especially zealous in speeding the return of sick officers before they were cured. They were unfit to fight and often died of their diseases. He burst in on medical inspections and interfered with the doctors’ work. One case would have found its way into the papers if the victim had not kept it quiet. An officer who could not straighten four fingers on his left hand as the result of a wound appeared before a medical board, which decided to discharge him from the army. Sandetsky was outraged. He ordered the officer to place his injured fingers on the table, and brought his own fist down on them with all his might. He broke all four fingers, and the officer lost consciousness.

  A frisson ran through his audience. This was just the sort of thing they needed. Go on then, swallow the bait, that’s just how it was, alas, and there’s no getting away from it. They say that the Grand Duchess Elizaveta Fyodorovna tried to denounce Sandetsky, but she was not on good terms with her sister the Empress, and Sandetsky began poisoning the minds of people in Moscow against her, as a German. Sandetsky finally went elsewhere—but where to? To the Kazan Military District, so that he lost little and we were not the winners. The new general appointed to the Moscow District was Mrozovsky, who was less of a savage but just as stupid.

  So many people in Russia are more concerned with their personal comfort than with doing their duty. The higher commands are grossly overstaffed—there’s a plethora of correspondence, personal aides, liaison officers, superfluous carriages, too much leisure, eating and drinking and card playing—and the worst you can threaten a staff officer with is the trenches! Here is a little vignette for you. Attached to the Guards Corps, and living in a railway carriage, we find Grand Duke Pavel Aleksandrovich. It’s a hot summer day. The roof of the carriage is covered with turf, and two soldiers are watering it. It’s staff officers like these who plan halfhearted operations in which they send 50,000 men to their deaths—a matter too trivial to be recorded by history.

  You want something bigger? East Prussia will do as well as anywhere. Do you think Samsonov’s army is all we wrote off there? There have been a number of other catastrophes in Prussia since then. Rennenkampf, who was so slow to come to the help of the other man, shortly afterward had to move quickly to extricate himself from the same sort of trap by abandoning his artillery. (This, incidentally, was another occasion on which we had been in too much of a hurry to save the French, this time at Ypres.) After that, we invaded Prussia twice more, by the same unlucky roads, from the south and the east, with no change of tactics or of armament, crowding in yet again, still imagining that we could win by weight of numbers, pressing on to disaster for a second then a third time. That winter, the 10th Army was routed in Prussia, and we left behind the 20th Corps, Bulgakov’s, not to mention some separate regiments. So that altogether we have barged into Prussia three times without proper preparation, simply to rescue the French. Ah, but! By way of punishment … (Those present all know it, they can put the words in your mouth.) Decorations were showered on senior generals. Kuropatkin was taken out of mothballs—sent to command first the Grenadier Corps, then an army, then an Army Group. The fossilized General Bezobrazov, a court favorite, is helping Brusilov to pulverize the Guards, but can’t sink below the level of corps commander. Or take General Bebel, whose natural element is defeat. Or General Raukh: he disgraced himself and his cavalry division in Prussia, was given a whole cavalry corps as consolation, and when Lechitsky took it from him Raukh received a Guards corps by way of compensation from the Supreme Commander, and sent it into the Styrian marshes, where the Austrians did not even need to open fire, because the Russians were drowning anyway. Zhilinsky, as you know, had in the meantime become Russia’s plenipotentiary at French GHQ. While Artamonov, who had destroyed Samsonov’s army, emerged from the inquiry pure as pure, and Nikolai Nikolaev
ich bestowed on him an oscular congratulation. When they took Peremyshl no one was judged more suitable than Artamonov to preside over the celebrations. And he, after letting 20,000 prisoners slip through his fingers and surrendering the fortress to the enemy, sat back duly awaiting his next appointment.

  Then there are all those people no one has ever heard of, pig-faced people, too big for their boots, with no real insight into the meaning of duty. People like General Gagarin, say, commander of the Trans-Amur Cavalry Brigade, who gets drunk and turns nasty with one of his regimental commanders: “You haven’t got any machine guns? So send two cavalry squadrons to attack the Austrians and take their machine guns from them.” Every such commander has thousands of subordinates, lays down their lives, and nothing is heard of it.

  Without stopping to assess the results of the first six months of war—the irreparable loss of officers, NCOs, and regular soldiers, the squandering of shells, the shortage of rifles, the invariable superiority of the German artillery, in numbers and in caliber: we had almost exclusively three-inch guns—without taking any of this into account and drawing conclusions, to then make a dash in the following spring for the rocky passes of the Carpathians, to cross over into Hungary! Not even providing sufficient cover on the flanks of the attacking units, shedding rivers of blood.

  The great Carpathian adventure! It was more galling than almost anything else. You couldn’t bear to think about it. After taking Peremyshl, without pausing to count their forces, they pressed on and on across the mountains, conquering crags with artillery fire, taking passes by storm … Such losses! So much blood! And all for nothing! The Hungarian lowlands were suddenly wide open—and at that very moment the order came to withdraw. And so precipitately, backing into those same steep slopes, wedging yourselves into gorges—so many losses again! A regiment might be written off in an hour … whole corps melted away … The ravines of the Carpathians were cemeteries for heroes.

  What made orders from the remote summit so unbearable was that you didn’t know, couldn’t see with your own eyes, the necessity for them, but could only wonder why, oh, why did we get into this fix?

  Mackensen’s breakthrough at Gorlitsa made nonsense of our whole effort in the Carpathians. The Gorlitsa breakthrough set rolling the whole great 1915 retreat—Russians without shells, with bayonets or sometimes almost with clubs, fighting a rearguard action against a modern army. A divisional general thanks a battery commander for his excellent targeting and in the same breath threatens to demote him for wasting shells. They retreated by night, when the Germans were resting, and they retreated in broad daylight, in danger from time to time of encirclement, and with the German artillery mowing them down. (And then again don’t forget we were surrendering fields of ripe corn, while columns of refugees struggled on alongside, people in rags, with looks of resignation on their faces, all their pathetic belongings on carts. If a horse fell, tears were shed over it, little burial mounds were raised over dead children.) When they exited from Galicia they hadn’t a cartridge left, nothing to answer back with. Their reinforcements were taken prisoner the minute they disembarked from the troop trains. There were planes in the sky—but all were German. And as if all this was not enough, the Germans released their poison gas and exterminated us by the thousand—turning us into green, yellow, and gray corpses with goggling eyes and swollen bellies—nine thousand were gassed in one attack in the 2nd Army alone. We were simply not expecting it, we were completely unprepared, had no defense against it—unless you count a gauze bandage over the mouth or celluloid goggles. They all perished. And all we could belatedly think of was to set fire to the brushwood on the rim of the trenches so that the flames would cause the gas to blow over the trench.

  The Russian army, marched out in so much more than fighting trim in 1914, by 1915 no longer existed. So much for the generalship of the Supreme Commanders. (His listeners would like that!) With our grateful allies complacently inactive, begrudging us even rifles. (Beg your pardon, mustn’t say anything about the Allies here, they won’t want to hear that. Such things are never mentioned.)

  “How, then, do you explain …?”

  We began 1916 in just the same way—with thousands of surplus men on the rosters but unarmed. We gave such people trenching tools and hand grenades, and lo and behold, they were grenadiers!

  “How, then, do you explain Brusilov’s breakthrough?”

  (We shall never hear the last of it!) That breakthrough, gentlemen, and more particularly the follow-up are not so glorious as all that. Two months of close combat with heavy losses ended with the capture of Lutsk and a few subsidiary townships. You can’t call it an offensive if you just push ahead without annexing territory. There was no decisive result, so we withdrew quickly. Brusilov’s successes are worth nothing, if you take into account all the men he lost in the ensuing months—probably more than a quarter of a million. What that breakthrough showed is that we still don’t know how to attack, even now. And how many obscure and unheard-of offensives, without a distinctive name of their own, do you think there were? This March, for instance, as the thaw set in, on the banks of Lake Naroch?

  No, gentlemen, Russia has nothing to boast about in what has so far been achieved in this war. Is this the way to wage war? These are not the successes you expect from such a giant exerting all its strength.

  There was an embarrassed silence in the drawing room.

  It’s easy enough to tell these stories and to listen with malicious glee to tales of muddle and incompetence on high. But what about ourselves? Which of us is inclined to talk about the no less destructive muddle down below, about mistakes and failings in the middling and minor battles which fill most of our days? Local defeats are concealed from neighboring units and the High Command, in fact nobody ever hears of them. Those withdrawing try to conceal it, try to delude their neighbors. Reports speak of “trying to estimate losses,” when in fact they are already known, but have to be concealed. Or you read “taken in battle,” when there has been no battle (and “in my presence,” meaning “give me a medal”). Or else they report taking places which have not been taken at all.

  Or they may send several cases of grenades in time for a battle, but forget at HQ to send a case of percussion caps. So—no grenades.

  Or else we launch an attack without knowing the enemy’s positions—no aerial photographs, no drawings at ground level. Because attacks are sometimes intended not to bring about a real breakthrough, not to draw off enemy forces from another sector, but merely to figure in reports to HQ. Send in the Yelets Regiment—carpet the uplands with them!

  A mortar battery and a regiment of field artillery suddenly received a consignment of shells after a long famine and furiously pounded a village in German hands. Telephone communication had broken down and there was some delay before orderlies from the infantry turned up asking, “Have you sons of bitches gone crazy? We went through that village during the night and are now fighting three versts west of it!”

  Another time they might be firing not on a deserted village but on their own forward infantry or their own scouts.

  Or a regiment might dig and dig and dig—only to find that it had entrenched itself in the rear of another regiment.

  Hard work—digging for no good reason. Life at the front line consists much more of hard work and endurance than of fighting. Trenches are, after all, just open ditches. When it rains there’s always water in them, and dugouts and bunkers are always damp. You’re lucky if there’s something to cover them with, but where there are no woods you have to sit around in unprotected positions or go ten versts on foot—I’m not exaggerating—to carry tree trunks on your backs, and carry them you will, if you want to go on living. Imagine what it’s like discovering when you’ve fortified your position that it’s “in the wrong place,” because the command has made a mistake, or the situation has changed, and you have to move somewhere else, and tote all that timber on your back again. All engineering work has to be carried out by the infantry itse
lf. A soldier has to do so much walking that no boots can stand up to it; they wear out so fast he looks like a tramp and has to make himself birch-bark clogs instead. There’s never any rest. Men are sent back into divisional reserve—but their company still has to turn out every night to do sappers’ work in the dark. So that there’s never time to train soldiers who arrive untrained. And they do so much trudging around and so much donkey work that positional warfare is a holiday by comparison. But trenches make a good fixed target, and on the most ordinary of days we carry a few men out, cover them with their greatcoats, and bury them in the dark.

  Or take the artillery harnessing ten horses to a shell box to haul it out of a rut. Or think of going over the top with mud by the bucketful stuck to your legs. And at the end of your run you suddenly find that the breaches in the wire are too narrow. So you’re bunched up together and caught in cross fire.

  Or you’re up in the mountains, attacking waist deep in loose snow. The wounded simply drown.

  The war is into its third year, and a variety of people, at various places in our fatherland, have gotten used to it, manage to thrive on it, pick up bits of information about what’s going on, and discuss the victory to come—while this or that battalion, this or that regiment, has an hour or two to live. A detachment is thrown into the attack, head-on of course, always over an expanse of open ground, and you’re lucky if you’re sent running for less than a verst. Others are told to use a spare hour to advance, occupy an unreconnoitered sector, and only then attack. In that hour, advancing for the last time, you do not let yourself be distracted by unreal activities or irrelevant thoughts. You all march as one man to the place where four out of every five will lay down their lives, and each man’s only hope is to be the fifth. Then you have to work out how long you must lie low to survive during our own artillery barrage—if any. How long will your wife remember you? Will your little children remember you at all? Yet your attack may be just a demonstration, just a sideshow. Three-quarters of a verst of open field under snow separates you from the enemy, you see the fringe of his forest like a black wall, and there, panting fit to burst, you find he has everything wrapped round and round with barbed wire, with nowhere to hide in front of it, your only hope is that there are hollows under the snow and you can flop into one of them and get out of sight. The scouts and grenade throwers crawl forward, and Division rings: why hasn’t the battalion been thrown in? “We have to wait till they’ve …” “Your orders are not to wait!”