A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (42 page)

Refusal to obey was out of the question, and Ludendorff prepared to go south. Before departing, he joined Hindenburg in drafting—essentially dictated for the old man’s signature—a telegram to the kaiser. “I have grown into close union with my Chief of Staff,” it said. “He has become to me a true helper and friend, irreplaceable by any other, one on whom I bestow my fullest confidence. Your majesty knows from the history of war how important such a happy relationship is for the conduct of affairs and the well-being of the troops.” Edging closer to direct criticism of what Falkenhayn was doing, the telegram added that Ludendorff’s “new and so much smaller sphere of action does not do justice to the General’s comprehensive ability and great capacity.” It ended on a groveling note: “I venture most respectfully to beg that my war comrade may graciously be restored to me as soon as the operation in the south is under way.”

The telegram sent, Ludendorff departed. Within hours he was in the south, involved with Linsingen and Conrad in finalizing arrangements for an advance out of the Carpathians. Even when he was deeply embroiled in military politics at their most vicious, even when he was using every trick at his disposal against his rivals, Ludendorff remained a resourceful, focused, and indefatigable strategist. He had added a team of talented code-breakers to his staff, and thanks to their work he knew what Grand Duke Nicholas was planning. Conrad had been right in expecting a new Russian attack through the Carpathians, but decoded messages showed that this was not all the Russians had in mind. Simultaneously they were planning to renew operations in East Prussia, and still other Russian armies were to drive through Poland into the German heartland. Ludendorff’s response was exactly as it had been when he was faced with apparently overwhelming odds in 1914. Instead of allowing the enemy to take the initiative, he would strike first. Again he saw an opportunity not just to hold off the Russians but, with coordinated attacks in the north and south, to cripple them.

Falkenhayn, in the aftermath of his restructuring of German forces in the east, was drawn into the planning of this campaign. On January 11 he met with Conrad, Linsingen, and Ludendorff at Breslau. Their talks were polite if not cordial. Falkenhayn thought it was little better than madness to launch an offensive against superior forces in mountain country in midwinter, and he said so. Conrad replied coolly that he knew the country in question and knew what he was doing. On the following day, at Posen, Falkenhayn met with the old Tannenberg team of Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and Hoffmann. This more private gathering was not a happy one; the pent-up resentments of the past months boiled over. By all accounts, Hindenburg and his lieutenants treated their commanding general with open contempt. Hindenburg told Falkenhayn that he did not have the confidence of the men under his command and should resign. After Falkenhayn’s departure, Ludendorff and Hoffmann talked Hindenburg into sending another telegram to the kaiser. This one was not at all groveling. It demanded the dismissal of Falkenhayn, the dispatch of the four new corps to the east, and the return of Ludendorff to Hindenburg’s staff. Behind it lay the unmistakable threat that Hindenburg was prepared to resign.

The showdown appeared to be at hand. The kaiser, offended by Hindenburg’s presumption and regarding Ludendorff as “a dubious character devoured by personal ambition,” declared that he wanted them both court-martialed. Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, ordinarily all too willing to stay out of military affairs, was horrified. He replied that public punishment of the hero of Tannenberg was unthinkable, that it was Falkenhayn who should be dismissed. Almost the entire imperial court was drawn into the struggle. Falkenhayn’s enemies, influenced negatively by his warnings of a long war and positively by Hindenburg’s and Ludendorff’s assurances that the war need not be long at all, were numerous and influential. The kaiser’s wife, Empress Augusta Victoria, was active among them. So was Crown Prince Wilhelm. Even Moltke, encouraged by Bethmann to hope that Falkenhayn’s fall might restore him to leadership, said Falkenhayn must go. But Falkenhayn retained the support that at this point still mattered most: that of Kaiser Wilhelm, who acted at last. Falkenhayn would remain at the head of the general staff, the kaiser announced, but would give up the war ministry. The contested army corps would be sent to the east, which the kaiser now declared the “theater of decision.” Ludendorff, as soon as he could be spared in the south, would return to Hindenburg’s staff.

Not nearly enough had been settled, and much damage had been done. Falkenhayn’s authority had been irretrievably compromised: his subordinates had defied him and won much of what they demanded. Falkenhayn’s removal from the war ministry was in all likelihood a mistake: he had proved to be a capable administrator, doing much to prepare not only the army but the German economy for a long struggle. The kaiser too had been damaged; his credibility as a commander, never strong, was wearing thin. Wilhelm was showing increasing signs of psychological fragility. Almost completely withdrawn from the real work of planning and conducting the war, he would relieve himself of nervous energy by cutting wood for hours. Unable to sleep, he would pass his nights reading popular novels. In the end he had to beg Hindenburg to accept the new arrangement rather than resign.

The confusion seemed boundless. At one point it was suggested that Falkenhayn should leave the army and replace Bethmann Hollweg as chancellor. Falkenhayn refused out of fear it would leave Ludendorff in effective charge of the army. Yet somehow these men were supposed to work together to save their country from destruction. The prospects were not encouraging. “I can only love and hate, and I hate General Falkenhayn,” Ludendorff declared. “It is impossible for me to work together with him.” Even Hoffmann, whose temperament was far better balanced than Ludendorff’s, told his staff that Falkenhayn was “the fatherland’s evil angel.”

But for now, for all of them, it was back to the war that was fought with guns. Conrad’s offensive began on January 23, when the forty-one divisions of a combined Austro-Hungarian and German force set out to expel forty-two Russian divisions from the Carpathians and proceed to the recovery of Galicia and the relief of Przemysl. This last objective was crucial to the Austrians both strategically and symbolically. Przemysl was the biggest, stoutest fortress in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the center from which Vienna had long dominated Galicia and its Polish-Ukrainian population. The Russian advance of 1914 had left it surrounded, with a hundred and fifty thousand troops and civilians trapped inside and running out of food and supplies. Conrad was desperate to break through before its surrender became unavoidable.

The campaign stalled almost as soon as it began. The problem was less the Russian defenders than the nightmarish difficulties of mountain warfare in winter—the need not just to attack but to climb up ice-bound passes. There were successes, but they were more than balanced by the failures. While one Austrian army captured the city of Czernowitz and sixty thousand Russians with it, another lost eighty-nine thousand men in two weeks. The morning discovery that entire encampments had frozen to death in their sleep became commonplace. Conrad, meanwhile, remained at his headquarters far from the action—an exceptionally comfortable headquarters where the generals lived with their wives in private villas.

Five days after the start of this offensive, Ludendorff, once again at Hindenburg’s headquarters, kicked off an attack in the north. In doing so he introduced something new in warfare: gas. The Germans began their assault The Eastern Front in winter by opening eighteen thousand canisters of xylyl bromide, a kind of tear gas that was supposed to be carried by the wind into the Russian lines and incapacitate the defenders without killing them. They had not understood, however, that xylyl bromide is ineffective in freezing temperatures. Thus it had so little impact that the Russians scarcely noticed it—never told the British and French of having encountered it. The advance by the German infantry, when it came, made modest initial gains and then was stopped by stiff resistance. Ludendorff, sensibly, called it off. He had accomplished his objective, which was simply to keep the Russians engaged while preparations were finalized for a more important effort on another part of the northeastern front. Engaged they certainly were. Counterattacks by eleven Russian divisions took back all the ground that Ludendorff’s offensive had gained—ground of no importance—at a cost of forty thousand casualties in three days. German losses were light: their infantry conducted an orderly retreat while the artillery tore chunks out of the tightly massed Russian formations.

The cold ruined plans and took countless lives.

In a month of struggle Conrad barely managed to take the objectives he had planned to reach the first day. Przemysl remained out of reach. Soon it was the Russians who were advancing, managing for a while to push back the Austrians and Germans but at last being stopped by the same impossible weather that had ruined Conrad’s plans. But Ludendorff, in the north, was just getting started. He had positioned the German Tenth Army north of the Masurian Lakes, the Eighth to the south, and on February 5 he was ready to unleash a campaign aimed at encircling and destroying virtually all the Russian forces in the region. Though exceedingly ambitious, this plan was rendered almost feasible by the way Grand Duke Nicholas, under conflicting pressures from the generals commanding his northern and southern sectors, had deployed the Russian armies. Russia, at this time, had approximately a hundred divisions on the Eastern Front with others moving forward to join them. They also had, as the failure of Conrad’s offensive showed, a strong defensive position in Galicia. The Central Powers, by contrast, had only eighty-three divisions in the east, half of them Austro-Hungarian, many of those of questionable reliability. It is at least possible that the grand duke, by concentrating most of his forces in the north, could have overwhelmed Hindenburg and Ludendorff. But such an approach would have required forcing the generals in the south to spare troops for the fight in the north. This the grand duke would not or could not do.

Just as Ludendorff was ready to move, heavy snow began to fall. It fell for two days, accumulating to a depth of five feet as temperatures fell to forty degrees below zero. The Germans attacked anyway. Even more incredibly, they made good progress, taking the Russians by surprise and driving them out of their defenses. Again, winter gave the fighting a specially hellish quality, made all the worse by a sudden thaw that on February 14 turned ice to ice water and frozen earth to mud. Earlier the Germans had needed as many as eighteen horses to move each of their guns forward through the snow. Now, with the guns sinking into the ground, no number of horses could move them. Soldiers became drenched with snowmelt and their own sweat, and as night fell their clothing froze hard. As in the Carpathians, men froze to death almost as often as they were shot. The battle turned into a race in which all the competitors were painfully handicapped, the Germans struggling forward to get around the Russians and encircle them, the Russians struggling to escape and abandoning trainloads of supplies.

Things moved to a climax on February 18, when a German corps managed to fight its way through deep snow around the Forest of Augustow and seal a Russian corps inside it. The trapped Russians put up a heroic defense through three long days, allowing other units to escape, but finally they were forced to surrender. The day after that some of the escaped Russian forces, having caught their breath, managed to mount a counterattack that captured no ground of consequence but brought the German advance to an end.

The German propagandists declared Augustow a great victory, one of Tannenbergian proportions. Ludendorff claimed that a hundred thousand soldiers and three hundred pieces of artillery had been captured. Though Russian casualties of all kinds were actually about fifty-six thousand and the number of guns taken was 185, this was a substantial success all the same. The Russians had been pushed back seventy miles. What mattered more, Grand Duke Nicholas’s plans for a springtime attack in the northeast had been wrecked beyond possibility of recovery. Hindenburg was once again Germany’s hero. The Berlin press declared him a genius, invincible, an almost godlike figure.

But the Russian forces in the north had not been destroyed as Ludendorff had said they would be. And although in the west a penetration of seventy miles would have been an immense achievement, in the vast reaches of the east it had little importance. Even Hindenburg admitted that “we failed strategically.” In the south there was no basis upon which even to pretend that anything had been accomplished. On February 17 Conrad had tried to restart his offensive, and the result was more pointless carnage. The winter campaign, by the time it ended, added eight hundred thousand Austrian casualties to the million of 1914. In attempting to relieve Przemysl, Conrad had lost six or more times the number of men trapped there. By April, even after rushing the recruits of 1914 into the field, Austria would have only about half a million men available for the front. It was a pathetically small number for an army at war with Russia.