A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (64 page)

After a series of delays that gave the Germans ample foreknowledge of what was coming, the Russians kicked off their attack on March 18. The dreaded thaw had begun the day before, covering the terrain with knee-deep slush, but success seemed certain nevertheless. Of all the Russian armies, those commanded by Evert and Kuropatkin were richest in guns and ammunition. They began Verdun-style, in eight hours firing thirty thousand three-inch shells and nine thousand heavier projectiles at the entrenchments of the German Tenth Army. When the Russian infantry moved forward—four corps on a front of twelve miles—it did so against a defending force that was barely one-fifth its size, and in short order it overran the Germans’ first two lines. In less than a week, however, the attack broke down completely, with the Russians trying and failing to take the high ground beyond the positions they had captured.

There are several explanations for this failure. Bad weather and inadequate air reconnaissance had left the Russian artillery almost blind, so that much of the barrage fell harmlessly on unoccupied ground. Even when the gunners had the opportunity to support their infantry, they often failed to do so. The end of winter, with the snow cover melting and then freezing hard and melting again, made conditions terrible for the infantry. The quality of the troops was low on the Russian side, high on the German, and the sixty-eight-year-old Kuropatkin was a deplorable product of the Russian autocracy’s tendency to keep mediocrities in important positions long after their unfitness had been demonstrated beyond doubt. A favorite at court, he had served as minister of war from 1898 to 1904 and then was given command of all Russian ground forces in the Russo-Japanese War. Though he had been replaced after causing a disastrous defeat at Mukden, his connections got him returned to senior command. He again performed clumsily early in the Great War but had nevertheless been made commander of the Northern Army Group in 1915. Now, at Lake Naroch, he failed to support the cautious Evert in much the same way that Rennenkampf had failed Samsonov at Tannenberg, and with equally painful results. Evert’s men, trying to advance in deep ice-melt against an enemy firing down on them from defenses that Ludendorff had been strengthening all winter, were massacred. Twelve thousand unwounded Russians, still flimsily dressed after a year and a half of war, froze to death when temperatures plunged overnight. The offensive ended so quickly, at so little cost to the Germans, that it had no impact on Verdun. Outnumbered as they were, the Germans had required no reinforcements.

At this same time there departed from the stage possibly the best leader, almost certainly the best man, in the French military establishment. Joseph Gallieni, whose interventions as a sidelined general had led to the victory at the Marne in 1914 and as minister of war had helped to save Verdun in February 1916, resigned in March in preparation for surgery needed to save his life. Worn down by the demands of office, told that he should wait six months to recover his strength before undergoing the operation, he refused. He hoped to be able to return to duty quickly (although, disgusted by politics, he vowed that upon recovering he would serve wherever he was wanted
except
as a member of the cabinet). But the doctors’ warnings proved accurate: he did not survive the surgery, dying on March 27. He was still a comparatively obscure figure at his death, his greatest contributions to the war effort unknown to the public. In 1921, posthumously, he would be made a Marshal of France.

Gallieni was not the only major figure to depart the stage in 1916. The year became a kind of parade of personalities, with high generals, admirals, and government leaders falling from power in all the combatant countries and being succeeded by new faces. Great changes in the French command structure began early in April with the arrival at Verdun of General Robert Nivelle, the dashing figure who in 1914, as a colonel in command of field artillery, had won fame by breaking up one of the last attacks by German forces advancing on Paris. A passionate adherent to the cult of the offensive, Nivelle in the year and a half following the Marne had become a favorite of Joffre’s, rising almost as rapidly as Pétain. Upon reporting at Verdun, he became commander of a corps on the east bank of the Meuse. That part of the battleground was, at the time, almost inactive. The Germans were focused on the west bank, pouring steel and flesh into their increasingly desperate, increasingly bloody efforts to drive the French from Le Mort Homme. “One must have lived through these hours in order to get an idea of it,” a French chaplain said of life in one of the fortresses blocking approaches to the hill. “It seems as though we are living under a steam hammer…You receive something like a blow in the hollow of the stomach. But what a blow!…Each explosion knocks us to the ground. After a few hours one becomes somewhat dumbfounded.” He wrote of badly wounded men left unattended for eight days, “lying down, dying of hunger, suffering thirst to the extent that they were compelled to drink their urine.”

Pétain’s artillery too was taking a fearsome toll, but literally foot by foot the attackers were clawing their way forward in what was by now a war of attrition of the rawest and most savage kind. Though the French defenses were once again firm—the Pétain system of rotating troops into and out of the battle was making the nightmare less intolerable for the French than for the Germans—the pressure on them remained intense.

And the losses were mounting: eighty-nine thousand French and eighty-one thousand Germans dead or wounded by the end of March. Nivelle, however, was intent on attacking. He began to do so repeatedly in spite of Pétain’s disapproval, blithely and with unshakable confidence shrugging off one costly failure after another. He had the enthusiastic support of a man who had come with him to Verdun: General Charles Mangin, now commander of the crack Fifth Division, known to his own men as “the Butcher” for his indifference to casualties. The aggressiveness of this pair won them Joffre’s admiration. Pétain, by contrast, was sinking into disfavor. Joffre was impatient with his stubborn unwillingness to go on the offensive and stay there, his repeated efforts to keep Nivelle and Mangin in check. Pétain regarded himself as fortunate to be able to stand his ground in the face of the onslaught on the west bank, and he was content to hold back and make the Germans pay the price of their persistence. But Joffre was always quick to remove officers who failed to do as he wished.

On April 8, blind or indifferent to the fact that only one day before the east bank had erupted in a German assault that pushed back the French front line, Joffre sent a telegram urging Pétain to launch “a vigorous and powerful offensive to be executed with only the briefest delay.” This was nonsense under the circumstances, and it was rendered moot by what followed the next day: an enormous, convulsive renewal of the German offensive on both banks simultaneously. The intensity of this new attack rivaled that of February 21; before sending their infantry into action, the Germans fired off seven trainloads of artillery shells. Only the guns that Pétain had concentrated on the west bank prevented a breakthrough. Then it began to rain, and the rain continued for twelve days, bogging everyone down and saving the French from being overrun.

For the Germans this newest failure was crushing. It led Crown Prince Wilhelm to conclude that the entire campaign was a failure, that continuing could no longer possibly produce results commensurate with the costs. (After the war, in his memoirs, he would write that “Verdun was the mill on the Meuse that ground to powder the hearts as well as the bodies of our soldiers.”) It would deepen the divisions within the German general staff and lead to a change of command. In the near term, however, only Pétain’s fate was sealed. Joffre could see nothing except that Pétain was still on the defensive, still not attacking. But Pétain was now a national hero in his own right, known to the public as the savior of Verdun and therefore safe from being sacked. Joffre’s solution was to kick Pétain upstairs. He dismissed Langle de Cary, hero to no one and savior of nothing, as commander of Army Group Center, which included Pétain’s Second Army. Pétain became Langle de Cary’s successor. The French Second Army, and with it responsibility for conducting the Battle of Verdun, were given to Nivelle, who soon discontinued Pétain’s system for allowing no division to remain under fire for more than a week at a time. This system had contributed immeasurably to French morale. But its end pleased Joffre, who had always regarded it as an unnecessary complication as he tried to prepare for an offensive on the Somme.

German and French gunners continued to blast away at each other on the west bank, and slowly the Germans inched forward. By April 21 there was hand-to-hand fighting for control of the Mort Homme crest.

It can only be mentioned here that intense but fruitless fighting was in process all around Ypres:

That on Monday, April 23, the city of Dublin exploded in an Easter Rebellion that British troops needed a week to suppress;

That the Russians and Turks were continuing their war in the Caucasus and around the Black Sea;

And that in Berlin the German government was once again engaged in a bitter struggle over whether to restrict the operations of its growing fleet of U-boats.

In the far South Atlantic the explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton arrived at a whaling station on South Georgia Island at the end of a horrendous year and a half stranded with his men amid the ice floes fringing the Antarctic continent. It had been 1914, the fighting in its earliest stages, when Shackleton lost contact with the outside world.

“Tell me,” he asked the first man he encountered. “When was the war over?”

“The war is not over,” he was told. “Millions are being killed. Europe is mad. The world is mad.”

The Eastern Front had fallen quiet in the aftermath of Lake Naroch, but there too important changes were taking place. On the day Nivelle arrived at Verdun, Tsar Nicholas peremptorily discharged Alexei Polivanov as minister of war, thereby removing a man who, in the months since his appointment, had been achieving near-miracles. Polivanov had been fearless in flushing corruption and incompetence out of the administration of the Russian war effort and in repairing the damage done to the tsar’s armies in 1915. He was dismissed not because of the defeat at Lake Naroch, in which he had no role, but because Tsarina Alexandra hated him and had long wanted him put out of the way. As a reformer, Polivanov was despised by the court’s inner circle; he was willing to work cooperatively with the national legislature that the tsar had been forced to create in the bloody turbulence following the Russo-Japanese War; and he had tried to dissuade Nicholas from assuming command of the army in 1915. All these things, in Alexandra’s small and rigid mind, made him an enemy of the autocracy that she was pathologically committed to preserving for her son. His final offense, the one that finished him, was to intervene when he learned that four of the war ministry’s fastest automobiles had been handed over to Rasputin to enable him to escape police agents. Polivanov departed in official disgrace and without a word of thanks. With Nicholas II away at army headquarters, the government was essentially under the control of the tsarina. And she was essentially under the control of the mysterious Rasputin. “I shall sleep in peace,” she told her husband upon learning that Polivanov was gone.

There followed the appointment, as commander on Russia’s southwestern front, of a still-obscure general named Alexei Brusilov. It happened—perhaps for no better reason than that even a blind hog finds an acorn once in a while—that this appointment put into a crucial position at a crucial time the most talented Russian field commander of the Great War. A member of a military family of noble origins (his own father had been a general), Brusilov had performed brilliantly at the start of the war, leading the forces that drove the Austro-Hungarians out of Galicia and back into the passes of the Carpathians. Later his army absorbed the German Carpathian offensive of May 1915, preventing a calamity bigger than Tannenberg. Brusilov had directed a two-hundred-mile fighting retreat, striking out at the advancing Germans night after night, disrupting their movements, and saving the Russian forces from being encircled. His appointment gave him the opportunity to transform the war in the east, and he would not be slow to seize it.

General Alexei Brusilov
Turned the war around on the Eastern Front.

Just days after Brusilov took up his new command, with Joffre demanding that the Russians do something more helpful than the Lake Naroch debacle, the tsar’s staff and front commanders met to decide what to do next. New as he was to such august assemblies, Brusilov showed himself to be the only general willing to commit to a new offensive. Thus he dominated the proceedings, proposing a joint attack by his four armies and the larger forces commanded by Evert and Kuropatkin to his north. In this way, he said, the Germans could be pinned down at every point on the front. They would be unable to shift their forces to wherever the danger was greatest. Evert and Kuropatkin, careful men under the best of circumstances and stunned by the failure at Lake Naroch, were unwilling to agree. They were overruled by the tsar’s chief of staff, General Alexeyev, an able strategist who had been Brusilov’s superior in 1914 and had personal experience of his capacities. Alexeyev decreed that all the front commanders should prepare for a joint offensive to take place in July. Brusilov was warned (perhaps because his group was the only one that did not greatly outnumber the enemies facing it) that he must expect no reinforcements. He returned to his headquarters and got to work. Evert and Kuropatkin did essentially nothing.