A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (53 page)

Kitchener remained skeptical about the prospects of success on the Western Front but was finding it increasingly difficult to act in accordance with his doubts. The enormous prestige that had prompted his appointment as secretary of state for war had by now shriveled considerably, at least in the eyes of his fellow cabinet members, and his hold on power was slipping. Kitchener had always been better suited to the role of satrap, to ruling distant parts of the empire, than to the compromises and collaboration of party politics, and his political skills had not improved since the start of the war. He remained secretive, autocratic, and unwilling to cooperate or delegate. “It is repugnant to me,” he had said after getting a taste of cabinet government, “to have to reveal military secrets to twenty-three gentlemen with whom I am hardly acquainted.” By the spring of 1915 he was sorely disliked and resented by many ministers and by the Tories as well.

In mid-May, with the bloodletting of Second Artois at its height and Haig’s attack on Aubers Ridge having come to its disastrous conclusion, Kitchener canceled an order that would have sent the first of Britain’s new divisions to the Western Front. Sir John French, driven half mad with frustration by news that three of the divisions were going to Gallipoli, fired off a wire to Kitchener announcing that he was so low on shells that he would not be able to resume his offensive unless immediately resupplied. When Kitchener’s reply arrived—it was, to French’s shock, an order to release 20,000 artillery rounds for shipment to Gallipoli—something inside the commander of the BEF snapped. Possibly too angry to notice that the message also said that the diverted shells would be replaced within twenty-four hours (a promise that was kept), French decided to make war on Kitchener. He called in an old friend and former army colleague, the London
Times
military correspondent Charles à Court Repington, and told him, not for attribution, that the British offensives were failing because of a lack of artillery ammunition and that the fault lay with Kitchener. A few days later a series of articles based on French’s accusation began appearing, with sensational impact, in London. Coupled with Fisher’s resignation, these articles created the impression of a government in chaos. The situation was worsened by two staff officers dispatched to London to explain French’s complaints. They found receptive listeners in Andrew Bonar Law, the leader of the Conservative Party, and David Lloyd George, who was becoming increasingly outspoken in criticizing Kitchener’s dominance over military policy.

Lloyd George, long one of the most brilliant stars in Britain’s political firmament, was emerging as a dominant figure. Paying a visit to Asquith, he warned the prime minister that he himself would make further public disclosures about mismanagement of armaments production unless drastic action was taken without delay. Asquith, being if nothing else skilled at self-preservation, reacted quickly. The government was dissolved and replaced with a coalition cabinet—the first wartime coalition in British history. Asquith held on to his job, but Conservative members became a major element in the cabinet and Lloyd George was the leader of the surviving Liberals. Parliament passed a Munitions War Act that established a new ministry of munitions, thereby taking responsibility for armaments out of Kitchener’s hands. The prime minister ordered him to start submitting frequent and detailed reports on his actions and plans, ending his freedom to operate in as much secrecy as he wished. Eventually, as a final humiliation, responsibility for strategy would be shifted from Kitchener to the chief of the imperial general staff.

Lloyd George moved into the new munitions ministry and took drastic action. He outlawed strikes in the weapons industry and sharply increased the production of heavy artillery and high-explosive shells. Trying to come to grips with a problem plaguing all the belligerent nations, he took steps aimed at controlling profiteering by arms manufacturers.

French, in launching his press campaign, had hoped to destroy Kitchener. But Kitchener survived, albeit with his authority diminished. The only politician destroyed was one whom French liked and admired: Winston Churchill. The Conservatives had old scores to settle with Churchill, who a decade earlier had deserted them to join the Liberals. One of their conditions in joining the coalition was that Churchill could not continue as First Lord of the Admiralty. Asquith was not a man to endanger his own position in order to defend anyone else, and so Churchill was out. He departed the Admiralty in tears, certain that his career was at an end.

Kitchener retained, along with his job title, the power to decide where to send the volunteer armies that were now fully trained and ready for active service. Weakened as he was, he finally consented to send most of these units where he did not think them likely to accomplish much—to the Western Front. He also continued to feed troops to Gallipoli, where victory seemed at once imperative and unachievable. With one of these deployments went a request that Hamilton tell him how many troops he thought he would need to take control of the peninsula.

Falkenhayn too was affected by the French and British spring offensives, if not so conspicuously as Asquith, Lloyd George, and Churchill. He understood that Second Artois had been a near thing—Pétain would have held Vimy Ridge if the reserves he needed had not been too far to the rear—and had no doubt that the Entente would be attacking again within a few months. This prospect worsened his uneasiness about German weakness in the west, increased his anxiety about moving troops back from the east, and made him more unwilling than ever to commit to the kinds of grand Napoleonic schemes that Ludendorff never tired of putting forward. He was haunted by the ruin that had come to Napoleon in 1812 as a result of his movement deep into Russia. His fears ensured that there could be no resolution of his rivalry with the Hindenburg-Ludendorff team.

The Western Front remained quiet through the rest of the summer—“quiet” being a relative term indicating a state of affairs in which only scores or hundreds of men were killed daily in obscure forays, skirmishes, limited attacks, and routinely murderous sniper and artillery fire. A letter that Private Jack Mackenzie sent to his wife in Scotland on July 3 illuminates life on the line at a time of little action. “We relieved our fourth battalion in here, these are the trenches which they lost so many men in capturing, & is just one vast deadhouse, the stench in some places is something awful, the first thing we had to do was dig the trenches deeper & otherwise repair them & we came across bodies all over the place, you know the Germans occupied these trenches nearly the whole winter and have been losing heavily & has had to bury their killed in the trenches, there were legs and arms sticking out all over the place when we arrived but we have buried the most of them properly now. The ground behind us us [sic] is covered yet by dead Camerons and Germans who fell on the seventeenth of May & we go out at night & bury them, it is a very rotten job as they are very decomposed, but it has to be done.” Mackenzie (who would be killed in action in 1916) goes on to thank his “own darling wife” for sending food and clothing by mail, regretting only that a recently received pair of pants was not some color other than white. “But many thanks dearest for sending them,” he added, “they will do fine.”

In the east, by contrast, the summer was a prolonged crisis. On May 10 the Russian Third Army, bleeding to death under the pressure of the Gorlice-Tarnow offensive, was at last given permission to fall back to the River San, where it was to make a stand. The Germans were hard on its heels and by May 16 were breaking through its new line (which was badly equipped, the Russians having sold to local entrepreneurs the mountains of supplies that had fallen into their hands with the capture of Przemysl earlier in the year). Soon the Germans were across the San, but then their offensive began to run down, encumbered by supply and transport problems in a region where good roads and railways were scarce. A Russian counterattack against the Austro-Hungarian part of the attacking force was initially successful, taking another huge batch of Conrad’s troops as prisoners. But it was not successful enough to balance the German gains, and within a week it too came to a stop. The Russian government, which earlier had been indicating a willingness to send troops to Gallipoli, announced that doing so was no longer possible. Its armies, in disorderly retreat in the southeast and threatened in Poland as well, had taken more than four hundred thousand casualties in May alone (bringing their total for ten months of war to almost four million). In the south they were barely able to pull back fast enough to keep the Germans from cutting off their escape.

Fearing catastrophe, the government in St. Petersburg developed new interest in getting Italy into the war. Prime Minister Salandra, sensing that this was the moment to extract maximum concessions from the Entente and willing to gamble on the eventual defeat of the Central Powers, made Italy a party to the Treaty of London. In return for a promise to enter the war within thirty days, he was given almost everything he wanted. The matter was not settled, however. Powerful groups in Italy were opposed to war, among them the Catholic Church and the socialists, who agreed on little else. When they learned what Salandra had done, these groups protested and the government fell. Salandra’s deal appeared to have died with it. But there followed a kind of protofascist coup d’état that foreshadowed the Mussolini era and led on May 23 to Italy’s declaration of war on Austria-Hungary. The government did not declare war on Germany, fatuously thinking that with this omission it could avoid unnecessary trouble.

The Gorlice-Tarnow offensive, though a triumph for the German high command, set the stage for further bitter disputes. Falkenhayn had wanted to stop when Mackensen’s army reached the San, but Conrad persuaded him to continue. As soon as he learned of Italy’s declaration of war, Conrad urged an attack into the north Italian plain. Falkenhayn wanted to subdue Serbia—a land route through the Balkans to Turkey was badly needed. On June 3 all the major players including the kaiser met at German headquarters. Falkenhayn, warning that fresh British troops were arriving on the continent in alarming numbers, said it was time to move at least four divisions to the West. Conrad pressed his case for an invasion of Italy and was taken seriously by no one. Ludendorff laid out his latest grand plan: a move from the north (where he and Hindenburg were in command) aimed at encircling whole Russian armies. Falkenhayn argued that not enough troops were available for such an operation. Ludendorff replied that nothing less could produce lasting results—that it was futile to keep pushing the Russians back without destroying their ability to make war.

Once again the kaiser ordered a compromise that left the heart of the conflict unresolved. Mackensen’s army would be reinforced with troops provided by Hindenburg and Ludendorff. (How the two must have seethed at that.) It and the Austro-Hungarian troops on its flanks would resume the Gorlice-Tarnow offensive as soon as possible. The rest of the Austrian army would move south, not to attack Italy but to prepare for a possible Italian attack.

Two weeks later, when Mackensen went into action, he was again startlingly successful. The Germans took possession of Lemberg on June 22 and crossed yet another river, the Dniester, as the Russians stumbled back to the River Bug. The Russians had been pushed completely out of Galicia, giving up everything they had gained since the start of the war, and their ability to fend off further attacks was questionable. In Courland in the far north, at the same time, Ludendorff’s supposedly diversionary action was posing an increasing threat to the cities of Russia’s Baltic coast. The dangers of the Courland campaign—if it continued, it could even threaten St. Petersburg—were becoming apparent to the Russians. Grand Duke Nicholas, visited at his headquarters by the tsar and trying to report on all the disasters coming down on his armies, collapsed in grief. “Poor Nikolasha, while telling me this, wept in my private room and even asked whether I thought of replacing him by a more capable man,” Tsar Nicholas wrote his wife, perhaps hoping to make her less hostile to the grand duke. “He kept thanking me for staying here, because my presence here supported him personally.” Riots broke out in Moscow. Houses and businesses owned by people with German names were looted and destroyed, but the rage was not directed at Germany only. At a huge demonstration in Red Square, people called for the tsar to be deposed, for the German-born tsarina to be confined to a convent, and for Rasputin to be hanged. The unraveling of the Romanov regime was beginning.

August von Mackensen
His offensives drove the Russians out of Galicia.

But even now the German generals were unable to agree on strategy. The leaders of Berlin’s eastern forces met again at the end of June. Ludendorff arrived with a new plan even more ambitious than the one rejected at the start of the month. It was Hoffmann’s work, and Ludendorff had accepted it only when, after an all-night debate, all four of the army commanders who would be responsible for its execution gave it their endorsement. It called for the armies in the north to move east to cut key rail lines, then swing south to trap the Russians in Poland. Encircled, the Russians would have to surrender or perish. Having been won over, Ludendorff was enthusiastic. He instructed Hoffmann to stand by at northern headquarters for a phone call announcing the kaiser’s approval. When Hoffmann’s phone finally rang hours later than expected, a furious Ludendorff told him that Falkenhayn had again rejected their proposal and had received the support of the kaiser for an alternative, less ambitious offensive.