by John Keegan
The “July Events” had caused Kerensky, the government’s only effective leader, to supersede Lvov as premier, while retaining the ministries of war and the navy. As Prime Minister, he also decided to replace Brusilov, though he had appointed him Commander-in-Chief, with an outspoken proponent of the anti-German war effort, General Lavr Kornilov. Kornilov was a man of the people, the son of Siberian Cossacks. For that reason he believed he would be followed, even by war-weary soldiers, in a personal campaign first against the defeatist Bolsheviks, then against his country’s enemies. On 25 August he ordered reliable troops to occupy Petrograd, with further orders to disperse the Soviet and disarm the regiments there should the Bolsheviks seek to take power, as seemed to be and was in fact their intention. Even before the fall of Riga, he had confronted Kerensky with demands for a programme of reform: an end to the Soldiers’ Soviets, the disbanding of politicised regiments.61 Militarily, his programme was entirely sensible. It was the only basis for continuing the war and for saving a government which, in a sea of defeatism, supported that policy. Politically however, Kornilov’s programme confronted Kerensky with a challenge to his authority, since its institution would inevitably entail conflict with the Soviets, the war-shy Petrograd garrison and the Bolsheviks, with all of whom the Provisional Government was living in uneasy equilibrium. As Kornilov’s popularity grew among moderates, Kerensky’s authority dwindled, until a challenge became unavoidable. Kerensky could not throw in his lot with Kornilov, since he correctly doubted whether the general commanded sufficient force to do down the extremists. Equally, he could not turn to the extremists, since to do so would be to subordinate the Provisional Government to their power, which the most extreme among them, the Bolsheviks, would then be certain to wrest into their own hands. He could only await events. Should Kornilov succeed, the Provisional Government would survive. Should he fail, Kerensky could resume the political struggle in Petrograd in the hope of playing the factions off against each other. In the event, Kornilov was manoeuvred by others into staging a coup he had not planned, which failed through the refusal of his soldiers to join in, and so was removed from command.
His fall ended any chance of sustaining the fiction that Russia was still fighting a war. The Provisional Government lost what remained of its authority in the aftermath, since Kerensky’s dismissal of Kornilov lost him what support he retained among moderates and senior officers without winning him any from the forces of the left. The Bolsheviks were, indeed, now determined to mount the “second revolution” and Lenin, who had now established his absolute leadership over the party, was looking only for a pretext. It was given him by the Germans who, during September, enlarged their success at Riga by gaining positions in the northern Baltic from which they could directly threaten Petrograd. The Provisional Government reacted by proposing to transfer the capital to Moscow.62 The Bolsheviks, who represented the proposal as a counter-revolutionary move to consign the seat of the people’s power to the Kaiser, won wide support for the creation of a defence committee with authority to defend Petrograd by every means. As they now controlled their own disciplined force of Red Guards and could count on their own ability to manipulate the sentiments of the Petrograd garrison to their advantage, it merely remained to choose a date for a coup. Kerensky, aware that a coup was in the offing, took half-hearted measures to defend government offices during 24 October. His orders, which were ineffectively implemented by officers who no longer gave him their trust, tipped Lenin into decision. On the night of 24/25 October, his Red Guards seized the most important places in Petrograd—post offices, telephone exchanges, railway stations, bridges and banks—so that by next morning the Bolsheviks were in control. The Provisional Government put up a feeble resistance which was quickly overwhelmed. On 26 October Lenin announced the formation of a new government, the Council of People’s Commissars, whose first acts were to proclaim the “socialisation” of land and an appeal for peace, to begin with a three-month armistice.
The three-month armistice effectively ended Russia’s part in the First World War. The army at once began to melt away, as soldiers left the front to return to what they believed would be land for the taking in their villages. The Germans and Austrians, nervous at first of dealing with revolutionaries, who were simultaneously calling for the workers of all lands to rise against the ruling classes as a means of everywhere bringing the war to a close, were slow to react to Lenin’s Peace Decree of 26 October. When world revolution—to the Bolsheviks’ surprise—failed to erupt and the appeal to peace was repeated by them on 15 November, the Germans decided to respond. On 3 December, their delegation, and those of Austria, Turkey and Bulgaria, met the Soviet representatives at Brest-Litovsk, the Polish fortress town on the River Bug lost by the Russians in 1915. Discussions, frequently adjourned, dragged on into 1918. The three-month armistice, tacitly accepted by the Germans, was rapidly running out, but the Bolsheviks, with no hand to play, continued to resist the enemy’s terms, which were for the separation of Poland from Russia and wide annexations of territory further east. Lenin protracted the negotiations, in part because he thought that, if peace were signed, Germany and its enemies would combine against the Soviet government in order to put down the general revolution he continued to believe was about to break out in Western Europe.63 In the end, the Germans lost patience and announced that they would terminate the armistice unless their terms were accepted and take as much of Russia as they wanted. On 17 February, their invasion began. Within a week they had advanced 150 miles, meeting no resistance, and seemed prepared to go further. Panic-struck, the Soviet government ordered its delegation to Brest-Litovsk to sign at Germany’s dictation. The resulting treaty ceded to the enemy 750,000 square kilometres, an area three times the size of Germany and containing a quarter of Russia’s population and industrial resources and a third of its agricultural land.
The Eastern Front, 1917–18
Germany had already transferred the best of its eastern army to the Western Front, in preparation for what it planned to be the war-winning offensives against the French and British, leaving only skeleton formations to occupy and exploit its new empire in the Ukraine. The Russian army had disappeared, its soldiers, in Lenin’s memorable phrase, having “voted for peace with their feet.” Hundreds of thousands had walked away from the war even before the October Revolution, into enemy captivity; “in 1915, while retreating from Galicia, about a million Russian soldiers became prisoners-of-war, three-quarters of them freely.”64 By the end of 1917 nearly four million Russians were in German or Austrian hands, so that the old imperial army’s prisoner losses eventually exceeded battlefield casualties by three to one; the most recent estimate of Russian battlefield deaths is 1.3 million, or about the same as the French, whose loss of prisoners to the Germans was trifling.65 The Russian peasant soldier simply lacked the attitude that bound his German, French and British equivalent to comrades, unit and national cause. He “found the psychology of professional soldiers unfathomable, [regarding his] new duty as temporary and pointless.”66 Defeat rapidly brought demoralisation, so that even soldiers decorated for bravery found little shame in giving themselves up to an enemy who at least promised food and shelter. It is greatly to the credit of Russia’s enemies in the First World War that they showed a duty of care to their myriads of prisoners not felt in the Second, when three million of the five million Soviet soldiers captured on the battlefield died of starvation, disease and mistreatment. Perhaps because captivity did not threaten hardship, the Russian army had begun to disintegrate even before the collapse at the rear. Once the Bolsheviks began to sue for peace, disintegration became terminal.
By the spring of 1918, after the German occupation of the Ukraine, the revolutionary government found that it lacked the force to defend the power it had nominally seized. The only disciplined unit at its disposal was a band of Latvian volunteers, more committed to the cause of Latvia’s national independence than Bolshevik ideology. The peasant mass had returned to the la
nd, leaving in uniform only a residue of the rootless, the lawless and the orphaned, ready to follow the flag of any leadership which could provide food and strong drink. Some of those leaders were ex-Tsarist officers, who, as opponents of Bolshevism, would raise “White” armies, others Commissars who wanted a Red Army, but in either case desperate to find men, weapons to arm them, money to pay them. The Russian civil war was about to begin.
ROUT ON THE ITALIAN FRONT
In Italy, too, there was to be a breaking of armies in 1917, to follow that of the French and the Russian, though as the result of a great defeat, rather than a failed offensive or a social revolution. In October, at Caporetto, a small frontier town on the River Isonzo, the Germans and their Austrian allies would achieve a dramatic breakthrough of the positions the Italians had so painfully won in the thirty preceding months and dash the fragments of their army down into the plains.
The Caporetto disaster lost the Italian army its reputation, which it failed to regain during the Second World War. Gibes at the military qualities of the Italians have been commonly and cheaply made ever since. Unfairly; the Italians of the Renaissance city-states had been notable soldiers, the Venetians an imperial people whose galleys and fortresses had defied the Ottoman Turks for 300 years. The Kingdom of Savoy had fought doughtily for national independence and unification against Habsburg power and battled as equals beside the French and British in the Crimea. It was only after unification that Italy’s military troubles began. Then, on to the hardy stem of the army of Savoy, recruited among the mountaineers of the Italian Alps and the industrious peasants and townspeople of the northern plains, were grafted the remnants of the papal and Bourbon armies of the south, toy armies without loyalty to their dynastic rulers or any sense of military purpose. “Dress them in red or blue or green,” the indolent King “Bomba” of Naples had once observed to his military counsellors during a debate on new uniforms, “they’ll run away just the same.” Bomba was a realist. He knew that, in a state where the landowners who should have supplied officers were principally concerned to wring the last ounce of rent or labour from the poor or landless peasants who supplied the rank and file, there could be no willingness to lay down life.
The professionals of the army of Savoy, an army notable for its skills in artillery practice and fortress engineering, skills the Italians of the Renaissance had largely invented, did their best to transform the old and new elements into a national force, and with high intelligence; one of the distinctive features of the Savoyard officer corps was that, alone among those of Europe, it offered Jews a career open to talents. The disparity in quality between the recruits of north and south largely defeated their efforts. It is now disputed that the southerners made notably worse soldiers than northerners during the war.67 Some southern units certainly fought well. Nevertheless, it seems indisputable that, while the better-educated and more skilled recruits from the northern industrial cities went to the artillery and engineers, the infantry was disproportionately filled from the agricultural south. “The north-south division within the Kingdom was thus perpetuated by these wartime developments,” with the poor southerners bearing an unfair share of the human cost of a war which had been initiated by the kingdom’s northern dynasty and was directed, harshly and inflexibly, by northern generals.68
The war in Italy, 1915–18
In the circumstances it was highly creditable that the Italian army had persisted in eleven costly and fruitless assaults on Austria’s mountain borderland. The incidence of an offensive every three months, between May 1915 and August 1917, was higher than that demanded of the British or French armies on the Western Front and the contingencies more wearing; shellfire in the rocky terrain caused 70 per cent more casualties per rounds expended than on the soft ground in France and Belgium.69 Italian discipline was harsher also. It may have been, as the Italian Commander-in-Chief, General Luigi Cadorna, believed, that the social frailty of his army required punishments for infractions of duty of a severity not known in the German army or the BEF: summary execution and the choosing of victims by lot.70 Nevertheless, it is unlikely that the British or Germans would have stood for such “normal persuasion” and it is a tribute to Italy’s sorely tried and dumbly uncomplaining peasant infantrymen that they did.71
All armies, however, have a breaking point. It may come when those in the fighting units are brought to calculate, accurately or not, that the odds of survival have passed the dividing line between possibility and probability, between the random chance of death and its apparently statistical likelihood. That dividing line had been crossed for the French at the beginning of 1917, when the number of deaths suffered already equalled that of the infantry in the front-line divisions: the million and more French deaths exceeded the infantry strength of the army’s 135 divisions. A survivor might therefore compute that chance—the “stochastic” factor—had turned against him and that, in the British Tommy’s phrase, his “number was up.” By the autumn of 1917 the Italian army, with sixty-five infantry divisions, or about 600,000 infantrymen in fighting units, had suffered most of the 571,000 deaths to be incurred during the war, and the sense of “one’s number being up” may have become collective. “Incredibly, morale still remained high on the eve of the Eleventh Battle of the Isonzo fought on the Bainsizza Plateau from 19 August to 12 September. The basic reason for this was rather ominous; everyone expected this to be the last, decisive battle of the war.”72 The outcome, however, was deeply dispiriting. “The army suffered 100,000 losses and the gains left the Italian front line more vulnerable than before. Fifty-one divisions … had been thrown into this massive struggle but by the second week of September the end of the war seemed as far away as ever.”
Not to the Austrians. Just as, in the spring of 1915, the Russian successes in Galicia that had led to the fall of Przemysl and Lemberg caused Austria to ask the Germans for help, now the weight of the Italian attack in the Eleventh Battle prompted a similar appeal. On 25 August, the Emperor Karl wrote to the Kaiser in the following terms: “The experience we have acquired in the eleventh battle has led me to believe that we should fare far worse in a twelfth. My commanders and brave troops have decided that such an unfortunate situation might be anticipated by an offensive. We have not the necessary means as regards troops.” His request was for Germans to replace Austrians on the Eastern Front, so that the divisions thus released could be brought to the Isonzo. Eventually, however, he was persuaded that German substitutes would be better employed against the Italians directly, a judgement Ludendorff endorsed, and, after a scheme to mount a diversionary offensive from the Tirol had been considered and rejected, it was decided to commit seven German divisions, formed with six Austrian into a new Fourteenth Army, in a direct counter-offensive on the Isonzo. The German divisions were specially selected. They included the 117th, which had had a long spell of mountain warfare experience in the Carpathians, the 200th, which included ski troops, and the illustrious Alpenkorps, a Bavarian mountain division, in one of whose units, the Württemberg Mountain Battalion, the young Erwin Rommel was serving as a company commander.73
Altogether the Austro-German force assembled for the “twelfth battle” numbered thirty-five divisions against the Italians’ thirty-four, with 2,430 guns against 2,485. That was certainly not enough to achieve a breakthrough or even, by conventional reckoning, to mount an offensive at all. Cadorna, the Italian commander, had, however, as a result of his repetitive attacks, both come to disregard the eventuality of an enemy counter-measure and, at the same time, created conditions that promised to facilitate an enemy success. By his capture of much of the valley of the Isonzo, a mountain river running through a deep-cut valley, he had unwittingly created a trap in his own rear. By pushing across the river, but not far enough, he had left two bridgeheads in the enemy’s hands, which offered them the opportunity to drive down and up the valley from north and south and join hands behind the whole of the Italian Second Army.
Such was the Austro-German plan. Ca
dorna had done much to assist its realisation, by keeping the front line full of troops, where they were most likely to be cut off, and positioning his reserves far too near the rear, whence they would have difficulty arriving at the front in the event of a crisis.74 The intermediate lines were scarcely manned at all; all this, despite clear signs during October that an enemy operation was pending. Cadorna, however, could not clearly identify where it would fall and, because his staff lived in fear of his domineering personality, he received no advice that more prudent dispositions of his forces should be made on the most vulnerable sector. The only subordinate to differ from his view that the ground gained in the Eleventh Battle must be held with every man available—General Capello, a corps commander in Second Army—actually wanted to return to the offensive.
Objectively, there was no question of returning to the offensive. The enemy was already too strongly reinforced. Moving under cover of darkness over several nights, in the deep valleys beyond the Isonzo, the German and Austrian attack divisions had no difficulty in evading detection by Italian air patrols and in arriving in their jump-off positions on the evening of 23 October.75 Next morning the bombardment opened early, first with gas against the Italian artillery positions—Hugh Dalton, a future British Chancellor of the Exchequer, then a young artillery officer whose battery was on loan to the Italian front, recorded that Italian gas masks were ineffective—later switching to high explosive. By seven o’clock the Italian trenches were devastated and the assault began.
The point divisions were the Austrian 22nd, locally recruited in Slovenia, followed by the 8th “Edelweiss” Division, largely composed of the élite Tirol Kaiserjäger. Attacking from Flitsch downstream, they were to follow the valley of the Isonzo towards Caporetto (called Karfreit by the Austrians), to meet the other point division, the Alpenkorps, attacking upstream from Tolmino (Tolmein). In the vanguard of the Alpenkorps marched the Bavarian Leibregiment (Body Guards), supported by the Württemburg Mountain Battalion. Rommel, commanding a group of the Würrtemberg Mountain Battalion’s companies, was no more content as a lieutenant with a supporting role than he would be as a panzer general in the 1940 blitzkrieg. He soon found himself separated from the Body Guards and out in front. There was little sign of the enemy and no resistance. “I then had to decide whether I should roll up the hostile position or break through in the direction of the Hevnik peak [a key height in the Italian rear]. I chose the latter. The elimination of the Italian positions followed once we had possession of the peak. The further we penetrated into the hostile positions, the less prepared were the garrisons for our arrival, and the easier the fighting. I did not worry about contact right and left.”76 Rommel was, in fact, practising “infiltration” tactics, a manoeuvre with infantry that, in the Second World War, he would repeat with tanks, driving deep, narrow corridors into the lines of the enemy, with the object of collapsing both their means and will to resist by a combination of material and psychological shock.