The First World War
Page 23
In the south the arrival of the German reinforcements, particularly the 47th Reserve Division of XXIV Reserve Corps, was to achieve quite different results. During November the Austrians had rallied, despite their earlier setbacks and the terrible losses those entailed, and had staged a series of counter-attacks around Cracow. Joined by the right wing of the German Ninth Army, now commanded by Mackensen in place of the promoted Hindenburg (his and Ludendorff’s theatre headquarters was known as OberOst), and reinforced by Böhm-Ermolli’s Second Army from the Carpathians, they succeeded, in confused fighting and at great cost, in gaining ground north of the Vistula between Cracow and Czestochowa, holy city of the Polish people. The Russian South-Western Front Armies—Second, Fifth, Fourth, Ninth, Third and Eleventh—were present in greater strength, however, and were able to bring up reinforcements. After ten days of fighting, which began on 16 November, Conrad had to accept defeat and draw his troops back to positions closer to the German border than those from which he had started. South of Cracow things ended worse. Because the front in the Carpathians had been stripped of troops for the Cracow-Czestochowa offensive, the five main passes through the mountains stood exposed to a Russian advance. Brusilov captured the Lupkow pass on 20 November and by 29 November Boroevic, his Austrian opponent, faced the prospect of an enemy offensive against Budapest.
Then the Austrians’ fortunes quite unexpectedly changed for the better, the result of their taking a well-judged initiative at a moment when material circumstances particularly disfavoured the enemy. Indecision, to which the Russian high command was so prone, further aided the Austrian initiative. On 29 November the Grand Duke Nicholas summoned Ruzski and Ivanov, the two Front commanders, to the Stavka’s headquarters at Siedlce, to discuss future operations. They disagreed, as they had done so often before. Ruzski wanted to withdraw the North-Western Front, because of the losses it had suffered at Lodz, to Warsaw. Ivanov, by contrast, scenting opportunity in the setbacks he had inflicted on the Austrians on the Cracow-Czestochowa line, wanted to regroup his forces and return to the offensive. “The way to Berlin lies though Austria-Hungary,” he argued.62 He got his way; but his freedom of action depended not upon the permission of the Grand Duke but on availability of supplies and reinforcements. Reinforcements were plentiful, as many as 1,400,000 recruits having been inducted between October and November, but they were untrained and many lacked weapons. Munitions were severely deficient. Russian factories had not yet achieved the levels of output they would in 1915 and, with the White Sea closed by ice, and the Baltic and Black Seas by the enemy navies, there were no imports. The artillery was rationed to ten rounds per gun per day.
Conrad struck while these circumstances prevailed. He had perceived a weak point at the junction of the Russian Third Army, south of Cracow, with Brusilov’s Eighth Army in the Carpathians where, between the towns of Limanowa and Lapanow, a gap of nearly twenty miles yawned. Opposite he assembled the best of the troops available to him, the German 43rd Division and the Austrian XIV Corps. The German division was fresh, the XIV Corps was not. Thousands of its Tyrolean riflemen had been killed in the September fighting near Lemberg and the reserves to replace the losses had been hard to find. Surprise, nevertheless, was on the side of the task force and on 3 December it struck. In four days of fighting the Russians were pushed back forty miles. Then enemy reinforcements began to appear and on 10 December Conrad’s drive was halted. It had, nevertheless, allowed Boroevic to go over to the offensive in the Carpathians and to secure new and stronger positions on the forward mountain slopes. As a result, the battle of Limanowa-Lapanow not only blocked Ivanov’s plan to thrust past Cracow towards Germany but also punctured the Russian dream of an advance on Budapest. It was therefore in its effects a double victory, nullifying the strategies both of a direct invasion of German territory and of an indirect victory over Germany through the defeat of Austria-Hungary.
Yet, though a victory, Limanowa-Lapanow was also a last gasp. Never again would the Imperial and Royal Army unilaterally initiate a decisive operation or deliver a conclusion an Austrian commander could claim as his own. Thereafter, whether in the conflict with Russia or in the coming war with Italy, its victories—Gorlice, Caporetto—would be won only because of German help and under German supervision. As it was, the army’s victory at Limanowa owed much to the loan of German troops. Henceforward it would always fight as the German army’s junior and increasingly failing partner. That was in large measure the result of its having entered the conflict with insufficient numbers to engage in mass warfare and of then suffering disproportionate losses. All the combatant armies had by December lost numbers that would have seemed unimaginable in July 1914. The Russian field army had been reduced from 3,500,000 men on mobilisation to two million; but it had perhaps ten million unconscripted men yet to call to the colours.63 Austria-Hungary, by contrast, had lost 1,268,000 men out of 3,350,000 mobilised but had less than a third as many potential replacements; the official figure put the number at 1,916,000.64 Many, moreover, were reluctant servants of empire and would prove growingly so as the war prolonged. The valiant mountain men of the Tyrol and Vorarlberg had given almost their all before the end of 1914; the Germans of Austria proper had also suffered heavily, as had the warlike Magyars of the Kingdom of Hungary; the Emperor’s Slavs would prove an increasingly doubtful quantity. The original setback in Serbia had been blamed on the half-heartedness of the VII Corps and its 21st Division, almost wholly Czech, in particular. During the fighting with the Russians, the Czechs of IX Corps were suspected of large-scale desertion to the enemy. The steadfastness of the army was further undermined by the very heavy losses suffered at the outset among its regular officers and long-service NCOs. It was on its way towards becoming what the Austrian official history would itself call “a Landsturm [second-line] and militia army.”
What that presaged was revealed when, the month after Limanowa-Lapanow, Conrad attempted to repeat the success further east in the Carpathians. He did so in concert with the Germans, who were meanwhile preparing an offensive of their own in Masuria to quash for good the Russian threat to East Prussia, and was lent three German divisions—3rd Guard, 48th Reserve and 5th Cavalry—for his effort. The plan was to attack in the lower Beskid range, where the German formations were to break through and then wheel outwards in both directions, assisted by Austrian divisions on the flanks. Conditions did not favour success. The Beskids rise to 8,000 feet, then had few roads and are covered by deep snow in winter. The Germans, moreover, were ill-equipped for mountain operations. It was not surprising that the offensive, which began on 23 January, made little headway. What was surprising was the early success of the Austrians who, in the battle of Kolomea, drove the Russians down the eastern slopes of the Carpathians and reached Czernowitz at the junction of the Austrian-Russian-Romanian border. The territorial gains made were shallow, however, and a renewal of the offensive on 27 February was rapidly checked by Russian resistance. The Austrians lost over 90,000 men in these operations, without blunting Russian effectiveness.65 During March the Russians counter-attacked whenever opportunity offered, against an enemy worn down by the harshness of the elements and the fruitlessness of its own efforts. General von Kralowitz, Chief of Staff of the Austrian X Corps, reported “men already cut to pieces and defenceless … Every day hundreds froze to death; the wounded who could not drag themselves off were bound to die … there was no combating the apathy and indifference that gripped the men.”66
With the failure of these winter counter-offensives in the Carpathians, the morale of the enormous Austrian garrison of Przemysl, surrounded since October for the second time, collapsed. Its relief had been a primary object of the January operation. When that and its renewal in February failed, the commander of the fortress, after attempting a sortie that a British officer attached to the Russians described as a “burlesque,” demolished as much of the fortifications as had survived Russian bombardment, blew up his artillery and munitions, burnt his supplies and, o
n 22 March, surrendered.67 Two thousand five hundred officers and 117,000 soldiers passed into Russian captivity.68 The officers, whom the British observer described as having “a prosperous and well-fed look,” at first suffered little thereby; an artist of the Illustrated London News depicted them sharing the cafés of the city with the conquerors, sitting at separate tables but exchanging salutes on entry and departure as if by the protocols of eighteenth-century warfare.69
In Masuria neither the Russians nor the Germans were in a mood for civilities. There the Russian Tenth Army still occupied the strip of East Prussia taken in the battle of Augustow at the end of September and the Germans were determined to retake it. There was more to their plan, however, than a hope of local success. It had two larger objects. The first was an encirclement of the Russian Tenth Army between Masuria and the forest of Augustow, last of Europe’s primeval wildernesses; the second was a wider encirclement of the whole Russian position in Poland, in concert with the Austrians’ offensive in the Carpathians. Falkenhayn had wanted neither operation, since both required reinforcements he preferred to husband for his continued effort in the west, but he was overborne by Hindenburg who, though his subordinate, enjoyed direct access to the Kaiser since his Tannenberg triumph. The troops were found, largely because of the German army’s superior ability to create new formations from its existing structures. While the Russians and the Austrians merely made good losses as best they could with often untrained recruits, the Germans subdivided first-line divisions, upgraded second-line formations and organised new divisions out of reserves and fresh classes of conscripts. In this way, during November 1914, it created eight new divisions for the Eastern Front from the replacement battalions of the military districts, numbered 75–82; though they had a strength of only nine rather than the standard twelve infantry battalions, these new divisions were as strong in artillery as the old and actually anticipated the nine-battalion organisation which would become the norm throughout the army later in the war. 70
The “Winter Battle in Masuria,” with the 75th, 76th, 77th, 78th, 79th and 80th Divisions in the vanguard, opened on 9 February 1915. Two armies, the old Eighth which had won Tannenberg and a new Tenth, attacked from north and south of the lake belt, broke through in terrible weather—snow, fog and bitter cold—and quickly threatened the Russians with encirclement. The Russian infantry, whose entrenchments were primitive and who were, as was common practice, badly supported by artillery commanders more concerned to save their guns than stand by the “cattle” at the front, fought back but were progressively encircled.71 Russian intelligence was poor, consistently underestimating the strength of the Germans; the high command, which had provided the isolated Tenth Army with no reserves, complacently assured Sievers, its commander, that the Twelfth Army, far to its south, would solve its problems. He had warned, before the storm broke, that “nothing can prevent [my army] from being exposed to the same fate as [Rennenkampf’s] in September.”72 No notice was taken by his superiors, so that, by 16 February, another Tannenberg did indeed threaten. Bulgakov’s XX Corps found itself penned into an increasingly constricted sector of the Augustow forest, by attacks so fierce that a principal casualty was the surviving stock of auroch, Europe’s last wild bison.73 The German pincers closed on 21 February, when Bulgakov surrendered with 12,000 men. The Germans claimed over 90,000, but the majority of Tenth Army’s soldiers not killed or wounded in the fighting had in fact escaped through the forest. There had not been a second Tannenberg but East Prussia had been liberated from the danger of Russian invasion for good—at least in this war.
The winter battle in the Carpathians promised no such clear-cut result. There, in continuance of the efforts at Limanowa in December and in the Beskid mountains in January, the Austrians and their German loan troops renewed the attack in February, only to find the Russians respond with unexpected energy. Conrad, the Austrian Chief of Staff, began the offensive with the twin aims of relieving pressure on the surrounded Przemysl garrison and of winning a success that might deter Italy, increasingly emboldened by Austrian setbacks, entering the war on the Allies’ side. The terrain and the weather in the Carpathians inflicted setbacks and terrible suffering on Conrad’s soldiers, who froze and starved amid the steep valleys and forests. The Russian formations, which included a corps of Finns, perhaps the hardiest soldiers in Europe, were less affected. They answered Conrad’s effort at an offensive with a counter-offensive of their own in late March which, despite the arrival of three German divisions, 4th, 28th Reserve and 35th Reserve, to the Austrians’ aid, pressed forward. By the beginning of April, the Russians dominated the Carpathian front and, despite losses throughout their army totalling nearly two million since the war’s outbreak, were again contemplating a breakthrough over the crests to the Hungarian plains, with results decisive for the whole eastern campaign, as soon as better weather came. The Austrians, whose losses in the first three months of 1915 added 800,000 to the 1,200,000 already suffered in 1914, were at their last gasp.74 Without massive German help, whatever price was to be paid for that by way of political dependency and national prestige, the Habsburg empire faced a culminating crisis.
SIX
Stalemate
THE EXHAUSTION OF ALL the combatant armies’ offensive force during the winter of 1914, in the east only a little later than in the west, brought Europe by the spring of 1915 a new frontier. It was quite different in character from the old, lazy, permeable frontiers of pre-war days, crossed without passports at the infrequent customs posts and without formality elsewhere. The new frontier resembled the limes of the Roman legions, an earthwork barrier separating a vast military empire from the outside world. Nothing, indeed, had been seen like it in Europe since Rome—not under Charlemagne, not under Louis XIV, not under Napoleon—nor would be again until the outbreak of the Cold War thirty years into the future.
Unlike the limes and the Iron Curtain, however, the new frontier marked neither a social nor an ideological border. It was quite simply a fortification, as much offensive as defensive, separating warring states. Such fortifications had been dug before, notably in Virginia and Maryland during the American Civil War, in Portugal by Wellington during the Peninsular War, at Chatalja outside Istanbul during the Balkan Wars and by the Tsars on the Steppe (the Cherta lines) during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. None compared in length, depth or elaboration with Europe’s new frontier of 1915. Measured from Memel on the Baltic to Czernowitz in the Carpathians and from Nieuport in Belgium to the Swiss border near Freiburg, the line of earthworks stretched for nearly 1,300 miles. Barbed wire, an invention of American cattle ranchers in the 1870s, had begun to appear, strung in belts between the opposing trenches by the spring. So, too, had underground shelters, “dugouts” to the British, and support and reserve lines to the rear of the front. In essence, however, the new frontier was a ditch, dug deep enough to shelter a man, narrow enough to present a difficult target to plunging artillery fire and kinked at intervals into “traverses,” to diffuse blast, splinters or shrapnel and prevent attackers who entered a trench from commanding more than a short stretch with rifle fire. In wet or stony ground, trenches were shallow, with a higher parapet to the front, built of earth, usually sandbagged. The drier and more workable the soil, the less need for supporting “revetments” of timber or wattle along the internal trench walls, and the deeper the dugouts; these, which began as “scrapes” in the side of the trench nearest the enemy, excavated thus to protect the entrance from incoming shells, developed quite soon into deep shelters, approached down staircases; the “stollen,” thirty feet or more deep, eventually excavated by the Germans into the chalk of Artois and the Somme, would prove impervious to the heaviest bombardment.
Yet there was no standard trench system. The pattern varied from place to place, front to front, the design depending upon the nature of the terrain, the ratio of troops to space—high in the west, low in the east—tactical doctrine and the course of the fighting which had caused the l
ine to rest where it did. On wide sectors of the Eastern Front in the spring of 1915 no man’s land, the space separating the contestants’ front lines, might be three to four thousand yards wide. Between Gorlice and Tarnow, south of Cracow, scene of the great Austro-German breakthrough to come, “there was not much more than a thin, ill-connected ditch with a strand or two of barbed wire before it, and communications to the rear often ran over open ground … There was almost no reserve position either.”1 In the west, by contrast, no man’s land was usually two to three hundred yards wide, often less, in places only twenty-five. Intense trench fighting could even produce an “international” barbed wire barrier, mended by both sides. Barbed wire had become plentiful by the spring of 1915, though entanglements, strung on wooden posts, later on screw pickets which could be fixed without noisy hammering, were still quite narrow. The dense belts fifty yards deep were a development of later years. To the rear of the front line, the British made a practice of digging a “support” line, separated from the first by two hundred yards and usually a sketchier “reserve” line four hundred yards further back. Connecting these lines, and kinked also by traverses, ran “communication” trenches which allowed reliefs and ration parties to reach the front under cover, all the way from the rear. Diagrammatically, the layout would have appeared quite familiar to any siege engineer of the eighteenth century: “parallels,” connected by saps.2 Any diagrammatic neatness, however, quickly disappeared, as trenches were abandoned because of flooding, exposure to enemy view, or loss to the enemy in combat. New trenches were always being dug to “improve” the line or make good stretches lost in fighting; old support or communication trenches became new front lines. A successful advance would leave a whole trench system behind, perhaps only to be taken over again as the balance of local advantage swung the other way. The Western Front, as the first air photographs taken would shortly reveal, rapidly became a maze of duplicates and dead ends, in which soldiers, sometimes whole units, easily lost their way. Guides who knew the trench geography were an essential accompaniment in unit reliefs, when one battalion took the place of another at the end of a front-line stint. So, too, were signboards pointing to the more enduring trenches and the ruined remains of human habitation; in the Ypres salient in the winter of 1914–15, there were still traces of the buildings the Tommies had named Tram Car Cottage, Battersea Farm, Beggar’s Rest, Apple Villa, White Horse Cellars, Kansas Cross, Doll’s House.3