Grey Tide In The East

by Andrew J. Heller

  Swing finished off his beer with one long swallow, rose from the table, and extended his hand. “Well, I wish I didn’t have to say this, but I have to shove off. It’s been great meeting you, Emma. It is an unexpected pleasure to run into a fellow American over here, especially one as pretty and as sharp as you. Next time I get to New York, I’ll look you up. Anyway, I have to get out to the front early tomorrow morning. I think the Germans are going to make another big push, and I’m going to have to be there to cover it. So, I’m for bed. Good night.”

  Emma ignored the proffered hand. She rose and emptied her mug. She set it down on the table. “Say, that’s a coincidence,” she said, “I was about to go to bed, too. Suppose I join you?”

  Swing smiled as he thought about the agreeable surprises travel to foreign lands can sometimes bring. “That sounds like a fine idea. It would be a shame to waste a good coincidence, wouldn’t it?” Swing suspected that he would be one tired pup at dawn when he left for the battlefield, but, smiling, he walked out of the bar with Emma Olsen on his arm into noisy night of Old Town Tallinn.

  Chapter Sixteen: NEAR LEMBERG, GALICIA, MAY 3, 1915

  Captain Stefan Fejes never regretted his decision to leave the Imperial Cavalry and join the Royal and Imperial Aviation Corps, in spite of the fact that he had seemed destined for a career in the cavalry. His grandfather had been an officer in the Cuirassiers, and had fought for the Empire in the victorious wars of 1859 (against the French), 1864 (against the Danes) and in the calamity of 1866 against the Prussians. Arpad Fejes had retired with several medals, a colonel’s pension and a wooden leg.

  His father been a Captain in the peacetime cavalry, and regularly lamented that he never had a chance to lay his sabre on the head of one of the Emperor’s enemies in combat. To Stefan, however, the prospect of wearing gilded body armour while leading a squadron of lancers in a cavalry charge was not romantic. He thought it an idiotic vestige of a bygone era. The age of fighting from horseback was over, or it would be if the hidebound old generals were not still preparing for the Napoleonic Wars. Fifteen years into the Twentieth Century, the Imperial cavalry still carried lances into battle, lances! as if the age of the armoured knight was still in flower. Of what use was a pointed stick on the modern battlefield? A mounted man was just a big, slow-moving target for rifles and machine guns, not to mention the effects of shrapnel from artillery shells on a man exposed two metres off the ground on horseback.

  The last legitimate military justification for cavalry was reconnaissance work. Light cavalry had proved its worth scouting for the mass of infantry and driving off the enemy cavalry to keep him from monitoring your army’s movements. But the rapid development of heavier-than-air aviation technology (and this also applied to dirigible airships) had rendered the scouting function of the cavalry arm obsolete as well. One man in an aeroplane could gather more intelligence, cover more ground in a single day than an entire regiment of mounted troops could in a week.

  The speed and modernity of flight had an irresistible attraction for him. Fejes had fallen in love with the aeroplane the first time he saw one at a fair outside Budapest in 1907. He ignored his father’s outraged disapproval of his new interest, spending all of his free time and practically all of his disposable income on flying lessons. When the Royal Balloon Corps was renamed the Royal and Imperial Aviation Corps, began to buy aeroplanes for military use and called for volunteers with flying experience, Fejes almost broke his arm in his hurry to fill out an application for transfer to the new Corps.

  His C.O. made a sour face when he signed on Fejes’ transfer. “You’re going to regret this some day, young man. Aeroplanes will never be any of practical value in warfare.”

  Fejes saw no point in debating the issue with the crusty old Colonel, but he harboured not the slightest doubt that the cavalry, sabre, lance, cuirass and all, would soon to join the Egyptian chariot squadron, the Greek phalanx and the Balearic slingshot corps on the dust-heap of military history.

  Conversely, aerial warfare was still in its infancy, and its future prospects were unlimited. In 1911, the year before Fejes joined Aviation, the Frenchman Edouard Nieuport had set a speed record by flying at more than 140 kilometres per hour, which Fejes found amazing. His own machine, a Lohner B. VI, had a comparatively low top speed of 115 km per hour after it was fuelled up and loaded with pilot and observer. Even so, it was a lot faster than a horse.

  There were certain days, like today, when Fejes remembered all over again how happy he was to be out of Cavalry and in Aviation. As he flew over the battlefield, looking down at the poor foot soldiers who had to fight it out in the mud, he thanked whatever gods there were that he was up here and not down there. Even seen from the considerable height of three thousand metres, the battlefield looked like a little piece of Hell.

  The big offensive had started three days earlier. The Russians had been steadily stripping this portion of the front of troops, sending them north to try to stem the German advance along the Baltic. Someone on the General Staff had finally realised that the Russian front, from roughly Seydlets east of Warsaw in the north to Czernowitz in the south, was likely to be thinned out and vulnerable. Moltke in Berlin had shipped the Ninth, Tenth and Eleventh Armies down to Galicia, sandwiching them in between the Austrian First, Second, Third and Fourth Armies, building up to over a million men altogether, and put the whole operation under General August von Mackensen. They brought in an enormous number of guns, both German and Austrian to put some real muscle into the attack. Fejes estimated that there were over a thousand guns of all sorts in his sector alone, from the big 30.5 centimetre and 21 centimetre heavies, through the 15 centimetre field howitzers, down to the 105 millimetre and 7.7 centimetre field pieces.

  The preliminary bombardment had begun just after sunrise at 05:10 hours one day earlier, with a roar that sounded like the end of the world. He could not imagine what conditions were like on the receiving end in the Russian trenches. He did not try very hard.

  But he was to find out soon enough. Two hours after sun-up, the squadron leader ordered the wing aloft to observe the effects of the bombardment. Fejes and his observer, a young Lieutenant named Weiss, pulled on their leather flying jackets, gloves and helmets (it got pretty cold up at three thousand metres, even in May), and climbed up into their seats on the biplane, waiting for their ground crew to spin the prop and get the engine started. In a few minutes they were spiralling up over the field.

  Fejes was in no hurry to head out over no-man’s land until he had gained enough altitude to be reasonably sure that one of his side’s howitzers did not accidentally put a shell through the plane. Finally, when he reached three thousand metres, he felt safe enough to level off and swing east toward the Russian lines, with the shells whistling by underneath them.

  Fejes had been over the Russian lines daily for weeks before the opening of the battle, and had practically memorised every feature of the defences for a hundred kilometres north and south, all the way back to their third line. The Russian defensive system was not very elaborate. In many places, it consisted of earthen parapets built up to about 5 metres in height, backed by trenches to shelter the rifleman. The line lacked the usual protective sandbag parapets; machine gun nests were few and far between; there were hardly any concrete, stone or even wood-reinforced strong points; and even that most basic element of modern defensive warfare, the ubiquitous concertinas of barbed wire, looked thin and inadequate.

  Now though, after a full day under this tremendous artillery pounding, he could scarcely recognise the Russian positions. In the place of a continuous line like long worms cut in the earth, there remained only a few severed, isolated segments. Large sections of the Russian front line works had simply disappeared, buried under great piles of loose earth or obliterated by gaping craters. Weiss yelled excitedly and pointed. A shell from one of the heavy guns, a big howitzer perhaps, made a direct hit on one of the few strongpoints in the Russian line, a concrete-reinforced artillery obse
rvation post on a little hill. There was an enormous blast and a billowing black cloud, and he saw great chunks of concrete tumbling end over end high in the air, alongside other smaller bits, some of which he was sure were men, or pieces of them.

  Everywhere below he could see the great geysers of earth flung heavenward by the explosions. The few Russian soldiers that he saw were running towards the rear, trying to escape the hellish shelling.

  Flying deeper into Russian territory, Fejes could see that there was no safety for the Tsar’s men further back. Shells were also crashing into the second line and behind it, disrupting the rear areas, blasting the communication trenches that ran up to the forward areas and keeping any reinforcements from reaching the front line.

  Five kilometres behind no-man’s-land, he flew over what had been a Russian artillery park. The big Austrian and German siege mortars had zeroed in on the coordinates of these guns (largely thanks to information provided by Fejes and his flying brothers, he thought with satisfaction), and their huge shells had reduced the Russian batteries to an open-air abattoir. Scattered all around, like a careless child’s toys, were broken guns and bits of guns, with many of their crews lying motionless beside them on the churned-up earth.

  His B.VI may not have been the fastest aeroplane ever made, but it had phenomenal endurance. Fejes had heard stories of Lohners staying aloft for as long as six hours straight without refuelling, although he would not have cared to push it that far. He was very comfortable staying airborne for four hours at a stretch, though. So, he was still circling at 3000 metres, continuing to observe the effects of the bombardment when, at exactly 09:10, the big guns fell silent.

  He heard the roar of a hundred thousand men over the growl of the B.VI’s 150 horsepower Daimler engine, as waves of grey-blue Austrian and feldgrau German storm troops clambered out of their trenches and moved into no-man’s-land. He was flying right over the boundary between the German Tenth and the Austrian First Armies, so that the Germans were advancing under his left wing and the Austrians under his right.

  The attacking waves crossed to the Russian positions (what was left of them, anyway) almost without opposition in most places. Here and there, a machine gun nest or strongpoint would provide a momentary check in some small area of the advancing tide, but these islands of resistance were quickly surrounded and neutralised by small detachments from the swarms of attackers. The attack went on through to the Russian second line almost without a pause.

  Here, relatively more of the defensive positions remained intact, and what did remain was manned by riflemen who continued to fire back at the advancing grey waves until they were either killed by bullets, grenades or bayonet attacks, or surrounded and forced to surrender. By the time Fejes had decided to return to the aerodrome to refuel, the Russians were still holding the third and final line, but it did not appear that they would be able to do so for very long.

  He ate a hurried meal with one hand (sausage and potato salad again, although he hardly noticed what he was eating), while writing a report of his observations with the other hand. He wanted to get aloft again as soon as possible, and was mightily annoyed when he discovered that the ground crew had not even refuelled his machine by the time he had finished his meal and returned to the airfield.

  However, after a few barked orders and some scrambling around by the ground crew, he and Weiss were aloft again a few minutes later. He had a feeling that something big was about to break, and he wanted to be there to see it.

  If the first two lines of the Russian defences were inadequate, the third line was far weaker still. There was hardly any wire, and virtually no built-up strong points to shelter the defenders’ trench mortars and machine gun crews. Fejes was aware of this from his many previous scouting flights, and he was convinced that if the first line two lines collapsed, the third would be swept away like a twig in a flood. He guessed that General Mackensen would want to keep up the pressure and would order his commanders to quickly reorganise the assault teams, bring up the reserves, lay on another preliminary bombardment and renew the attack to create a clean breach through the Russian line while there was still plenty of daylight to exploit the breakthrough.

  They floated over the cratered beet fields (there would be a poor harvest this year for the local farmers) for two hours, as the German and Austrian heavy guns reduced the final Russian defensive position to a chaotic scramble of mud, men and weapons. When the guns fell quiet, a renewed tide of Teutonic soldiers poured out of the captured Russian trenches. Almost as soon as the attackers emerged, he saw a trickle of the brown-clad defenders fleeing their line and running east. As the attacking force drew closer, the trickle became a flood composed of thousands of Russian soldiers throwing away rifles, packs, and anything else that could encumber them, fleeing the battlefield as fast as their legs could carry them. Many thousands more emerged from their trenches with their hands held high as the troops reached their positions.

  These were clearly not the same Russian soldiers who had fought so well back in August, when they had thrown back the Austrian Army’s opening offensive out of Galicia, and had come close to surrounding and annihilating three of the four invading Austrian field armies. These, the Russian infantry of May 1915, were beaten men. Fejes did not think that anything short of a miracle could rally them.

  Now, three days later, he had not seen anything to prove him wrong. The armies advanced into a vacuum along most of the front, marching forward twenty-five kilometres a day against practically no opposition. A few isolated Russian units put up fierce resistance: in the town of Sandomierz, an entire corps dug in and fought for two days until they ran out of ammunition and were forced to surrender. But, for the most part, it seemed that the Russian Army had ceased to exist as an organised fighting force in this part of Poland. Fejes had heard about the great victories won by the Germans up north; it was apparent that the Russians were losing everywhere. He wondered if the war in the East was nearly over.

  Chapter Seventeen: LONDON, MAY 23, 1915

  The Honourable Winston Churchill gazed down at the bundle of newspapers, and then swung his head upwards to fix a baleful glare on the Lieutenant who had just delivered them, as if whatever was troubling the First Lord of the Admiralty was somehow the fault of his young aide.

  “How is it,” he growled, “that the private news journals are in a position to obtain essential military information more promptly than His Majesty’s Government?” he demanded, slapping the pile with the back of his hand, and sending cigar ash flying.

  The Lieutenant stammered, “Why… I don’t know, sir… I suppose…”

  Churchill did not wait to hear the young officer’s answer to a question that had not, in truth, been directed at him. “Never mind,” he interrupted. He motioned with his cigar. “You are dismissed. Remain within earshot just outside that door,” he cautioned the aide, quite unnecessarily. Churchill’s regular aide was out attending a sick relative today, and the First Lord was suspicious of any changes in his staff. The Lieutenant saluted, and slipped silently out the door.

  The truth was that Churchill was not nearly so displeased by the fact that the news media had “scooped” the official British government sources (he had no quarrel with the press in general, having started his career in public life as a war reporter), as by the news itself. He picked up the Sunday Times from the stack. The lead story was “Russians Ask for Cease-Fire,” and below in smaller type was written “Fighting to Cease at 12:00 P.M., 26 May.” Gloomily, he read the article that followed.

  The German-Austrian offensive in Galicia that had begun at the beginning of May had resulted in the rapid disintegration of the Tsar’s armies on the southern half of the front. The Russian soldiers did not simply retreat; many apparently made up their minds that the war was over and had gone home for good. For three weeks, the Teutonic armies had advanced through Poland and the Ukraine with virtually no resistance. The Times reported that, as had happened elsewhere, the invaders were greeted by cheer
ing crowds, flowers, and kisses from the local women. The Tsar’s government was evidently no more popular in Poland and the Ukraine than it had been in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia or Finland.

  In the north, the Germans had approached to within fifty kilometres of St. Petersburg. In this sector, so near to the capital, the Russian soldiers were still willing to fight, even if not very effectively. Even so, it was clear that if the Tsar’s government had not asked for an armistice, St. Petersburg would have fallen in a matter of weeks, possibly even days. While the lines had stabilised in the north after the cease-fire agreement had been reached, in the south the German, Austrian, and Rumanian armies continued to advance as rapidly as they could, trying to occupy as much Russian territory as possible before the cease-fire took effect.

  He put The Times aside to read the Daily Mirror. “Demonstrations in St. Petersburg” was the headline there. The subheading was “Calls from Duma for Tsar to Abdicate.” Churchill shook his head as he read the story, frowned, and unconsciously made a low rumbling noise deep in his throat. It was the Revolution of 1905 all over again, except that this time the scope of the disaster was far greater and the probability that Nicholas II would be able to retain his throne was too small to consider.