A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (39 page)

Denied the manpower their original plan required, Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and Hoffmann did not give up. They moved their Ninth Army, the one that had had such a narrow escape from the Russians near Warsaw, back into East Prussia by train. There they combined it with the Eighth Army to form a mass of troops extending across seventy miles. They then waited as the Russians moved across Poland toward the west. When, as expected, the advance began to show signs of bogging down under its own tremendous weight and the difficulties of resupply, they sent their two armies down on it like a hammer. At the main point of contact the Germans actually had a numerical advantage, and the Russians were staggered. After four days of hard fighting they began to retreat. The Germans pursued, hitting at the Russians repeatedly.

Falkenhayn was attacking again in Flanders, this time using more experienced troops and limiting himself to a narrower front. What he got was not victory but another series of inconclusive battles all along the ridge outside Ypres, which was slowly being destroyed as the Germans shelled the ancient towers being used by the defenders as observation posts. Large and small groups of soldiers dashed from village to woodland, from canal to hedgerow, settling into firefights, advancing with bayonets, being thrown back and counterattacking while artillery from both sides rained shrapnel and high explosives down on every target their spotters could find. The nature of the struggle is captured in the official account of First Ypres later prepared for the German general staff:

The enemy turned every house, every wood and every wall into a strong point, and each of them had to be stormed by our men with heavy loss. Even when the first line of these fortifications had been taken they were confronted by a second one immediately behind it; for the enemy showed great skill in taking every advantage of the ground, unfavorable in any case to the attacker. To the east and south-east of Ypres, even more developed than in the north, there were thick hedges, wire fences and broad dikes. Numerous woods also of all sizes with dense undergrowth made the country almost impassable and most difficult for observation purposes. Our movements were constantly being limited to the roads which were swept by the enemy’s machine-guns. Owing to the preparatory artillery bombardments the villages were mostly in ruins by the time the infantry reached them, but the enemy fought desperately for every heap of stones and every pile of bricks before abandoning them. In the few village streets that remained worthy of the name the fighting generally developed into isolated individual combats, and no description can do adequate justice to the bravery of the German troops on such occasions.

Nor, of course, is it possible to do justice to—perhaps even to understand—the bravery of the British and French troops who were defending those piles of stones and bricks. Even the barest chronology of how the villages near Ypres were taken and surrendered and taken again is enough to show why, in the end, hardly a stone was left standing upon a stone. Lombartzyde was captured by the Germans on October 23, retaken by the French a day later, recaptured by the Germans on October 28, taken yet again by the British and French on November 4, recaptured by the Germans on November 7, only to change hands twice more before finally and permanently ending up in the possession of the Germans.

Gradually, village by village, the Germans managed to inch forward and tighten their grip on the Ypres Salient, the semicircle held by the French and British east of the town. But time after time they failed to break through. On several occasions various French and British generals suggested that a retreat might be in order. Always it was Foch who refused. Before the war he had written that an army is never defeated until it believes itself to be defeated. Now, with considerable help from the Tommies, he appeared to be proving his point.

The German offensive crested on November 11 when the most elite unit in the entire German army, the First Guards Regiment led by the kaiser’s son Prince Eitel Friedrich, drove the British troops out of Nonnebosschen. It was a repeat of Gheluvelt. Once again nothing separated the Germans from Ypres, and once again a ragtag assortment of the only British soldiers in the neighborhood (not combat troops at all but cooks, drivers, staff officers—anyone who could pick up a rifle) mounted a seemingly hopeless counterattack. Once again the Germans thought that the mysteriously absent Entente reserves must be moving into action at last and fled. That turned out to be the last time the Germans came close to breaking through.

The fighting went on until November 22, with more attacks, but increasingly it was an obviously futile struggle in rain and cold mud by half-crazed and hungry men desperate for rest. Even the old lion Kitchener was horrified. “This,” he exclaimed, “is not war!” Whatever it was, it finally came to an end when the rains turned to snow and the mud froze hard and the impossibility of achieving anything became too obvious to be ignored. Both sides claimed victory, the Entente because they had held on to Ypres and kept the Germans from reaching the Channel ports, the Germans not only because they had kept the enemy from breaking through but because by the end they had captured so many of the strongpoints around the destroyed town that the British and French no longer had an adequate base from which to launch new offensives.

By the time the Flanders front shut down for the winter, the British had taken fifty thousand casualties there. More than half of the one hundred and sixty thousand men that Britain had by then sent to France were dead or wounded. France’s Ypres losses are believed to exceed fifty thousand, Germany’s at least one hundred thousand.
Burke’s Peerage,
the registry of Britain’s noble families, had to postpone publication of its latest edition to make the editorial changes required by the death in combat of sixty-six peers, ninety-five sons of peers, sixteen baronets, eighty-two sons of baronets, and six knights.

The Russian retreat across Poland continued, with the Germans in pursuit. First the Russians tried to withdraw behind an expanse of wet lowland marshes, but the Germans drove them out. Then they tried to make a stand at the city of Lodz, but on December 6 they were again forced to move on. They had lost another ninety thousand men at Lodz, the Germans thirty-five thousand. The Germans were thirty miles east of Lodz, and in possession of a hundred and thirty-six thousand Russian prisoners, when their drive finally came to a stop. Winter made the stop necessary—the killing Russian winter. “Only about half had overcoats,” an English war correspondent observed of German soldiers captured in a Russian counterattack. “And these were made of a thin, shoddy material that is about as much protection as paper against the Russian wind. When you know that the prison camps are all in Siberia, try and think of the lot of prisoners. Yet for the moment the Germans were content. They were allowed to sleep. This is the boon that the man fresh from the trenches asks above all things. His days and nights have been one constant strain of alertness. His brain has been racked with the roar of cannon and his nerves frayed by the irregular bursting of shell. His mind is chaos…But when a soldier is once captured he feels that this responsibility of holding back the enemy is no longer his. He has failed. Well, he can sleep in peace now.”

Both sides settled down to hacking makeshift defenses out of the frozen earth. The Germans had lost a hundred thousand men in this last 1914 campaign while inflicting the astounding total of five hundred and thirty thousand casualties on the Russians. Their success, however, was of discouragingly limited value. As winter arrived, the Russians had 120 divisions on the front, and each division included twelve battalions. The Germans and Austrians together could muster only sixty divisions of eight battalions each.

For Conrad and his armies, December was a month of high drama, of brief glory followed by final humiliation. As it opened, one of the Russian armies advancing against the Carpathians had taken possession of a mountain pass that gave it a gateway into Hungary. The commander of this Russian Eighth Army, a talented general named Alexei Brusilov, was in position to advance on Budapest and begin the conquest of the Hapsburg homeland. But at just this moment Conrad tried something that worked. He learned of a gap between Brusilov and the Russian army on its right, assembled an attack force, and on December 3 drove it into the gap. The Russians were thrown off balance. In four days Conrad drove them back forty miles. Though the masses of reinforcements sent forward out of the Russian reserve brought him to a halt by December 10, the victory was an important one. It spoiled the Russians’ hopes of crossing the Carpathians. It also rendered them incapable of executing a newly hatched plan to send a force from Krakow toward Germany. In combination with Hindenburg’s and Ludendorff’s November successes in Poland, it left the Russians bogged for the winter far from Berlin, Budapest, and Vienna.

Conrad poisoned his own hour of triumph by launching a year-end invasion of Serbia, his third since the start of the war. This newest incursion started as promisingly as the others, with the Austrians quickly taking possession of much of the Serbian interior along with Belgrade. Just one day after the fall of Belgrade, however, in a moment of Balkan high drama, the mustachioed King Peter of Serbia, rifle in hand, announced to his soldiers that he was releasing them from their pledge to fight for him and the homeland but that he for one was going to the front, alone if necessary. This gesture rallied every doubting patriot to the cause. A counterattack organized by Serbian General Radomir Putnik—the same old soldier who had been caught vacationing in Austrian territory when the war began but was allowed to return home in an act of almost medieval courtesy by Emperor Franz Joseph—sent two hundred thousand Serb troops down on the overextended Austrians. The Austrians, who had gone days without food and were freezing in summer uniforms, fled back across the border. Again their losses were outlandish: twenty-eight thousand dead, a hundred and twenty thousand wounded, seventy-six thousand taken prisoner. The Serbs too had been badly hurt, with twenty-two thousand killed, ninety-two thousand wounded, nine thousand captured or missing, and the survivors ravaged by dysentery and cholera.

Never again, in the years of fighting that lay ahead, would the Austro-Hungarians be involved in a major offensive as anything more than adjuncts to the Germans. Never again would they win a major victory they could call their own. With the war scarcely begun, they were a spent force. With almost four years of war remaining, nearly two hundred thousand of Vienna’s best troops—including ruinous numbers of its experienced officers and noncoms—were dead. Almost half a million had been wounded, and some one hundred and eighty thousand were prisoners of the Russians.

There was fighting elsewhere as the year drew to a close. Even after the last assault at Ypres, the Western Front was never entirely quiet. Joffre kept ordering attacks wherever he thought the enemy wall might be weak. “Nibbling,” he called it, but its cost in lives was high. By March it would add another hundred thousand casualties to the French total.

People were becoming accustomed to the term
world war.
Since August there had been naval battles, some of them high in drama but none terribly important, all around the globe. There was bloodshed in Africa as the police and small military forces of the various European colonies jockeyed for advantage and the indigenous populations became involved, and in the Far East Japan helped itself to Germany’s scattered holdings.

The Middle East was being drawn in as well. The newest member of the Central Powers, Turkey, sent troops based in Syria into Persia. After so many years of watching the Europeans feast on its crumbling empire, the government in Constantinople was eager to recover some of its losses at last.

The British, in particular, were disturbed. When Russia suggested that a show of force near Istanbul might frighten the Turks and cause them to pull back from Persia, London found the idea attractive. A battleship was dispatched to the mouth of the Dardanelles, the narrow channel leading from the northeastern Mediterranean to Constantinople, the Black Sea, and Russia beyond.

Upon arrival, the ship began shelling one of the outermost forts guarding the Dardanelles. Within half an hour the fort was totally wrecked, incapable of defending itself or the sea route to Constantinople.

The battleship, never threatened while it did its work, steamed serenely away. The whole thing had been so
easy.
First Lord of the Admiralty Churchill began to wonder: might the entire passage up to Constantinople be that easily taken?

In Flanders, where there had been so much horror, 1914 ended with a strange spontaneous eruption of fellow feeling. On Christmas morning, in their trenches opposite the British near Ypres, German troops began singing carols and displaying bits of evergreen decorated in observance of the occasion. The Tommies too began to sing. Cautiously, unarmed Germans began showing themselves atop their defenses. Some of the British did the same. Step by step this led to a gathering in no-man’s-land of soldiers from both sides, to exchanges of food and cigarettes, even to games of soccer.

This was the Christmas Truce of 1914, and in places it continued for more than a day. The generals, indignant when they learned of it, made certain that nothing of the kind would happen again.