A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (72 page)

Sir Henry Rawlinson was slowly and with difficulty winning Haig’s approval for another attack on the Somme. His plan this time was to send four divisions (with others guarding their flanks) across no-man’s-land in the middle of the night, pause while the artillery pounded the Germans for only five minutes, and attack in the earliest predawn light. The French, judging the dangers of being caught on open ground after sunrise to be unacceptably great, refused to join in. But when the attack went off on July 14, it was a complete success—at first. There were only four battalions of defenders, and the British quickly overran their first line and broke through parts of the second. This time (and for the first time since 1914) the British cavalry did get into action, but it had been positioned so far behind the lines that it needed nine hours to reach the point of breakthrough. By the time it arrived, the Germans had been able to rush forward reserves to block the hole. Men and horses were mowed down by machine guns, and by the end of the day the Germans were once again in control of their second line. It had been a near thing, however. Although Haig by now had given up on achieving and exploiting a breakthrough, this latest attack persuaded him that the Germans really were at the end of their manpower. He decided that the Somme was worth continuing as an attrition battle. Encouraged by his staff’s exaggerations of German losses, he approved Rawlinson’s plan for yet another assault later in the month.

Across Europe it went on and on, new offensives coming one after another like waves on a sea of blood. At Verdun, a day after Rawlinson’s July 14 offensive, Mangin the Butcher, lifted out of disfavor by Nivelle and promoted to command of a corps, sent a division to capture the village of Fleury. This was such a total failure, costing the French so many men, that Pétain intervened. He ordered that there were to be no more attacks without his specific approval, and he made it clear that he would approve no actions that had not been properly prepared. Mangin and his chief, Nivelle, began laying plans for an even bigger assault of a kind that Pétain would have to approve.

On July 23 Rawlinson launched his next attack. The troops of the Anzac Corps, many of them veterans of Gallipoli, took possession of part of Pozières Ridge, their assigned objective. But that was the only thing gained in another round of heavy losses, and the fight dragged on fruitlessly for another two months. “Although most Australian soldiers were optimists, and many were opposed on principle to voicing—or even harboring—grievances, it is not surprising if the effect on some intelligent men was a bitter conviction that they were being uselessly sacrificed,” the official Australian history of the battle later observed.

On July 25 a Russian general nearly as talented as Brusilov, Nikolai Yudenich, commander of an army that had been winning victory after victory in the Caucasus, found that masses of Turks were converging on him from two directions. He struck at the Turkish Third Army and shattered it, killing or wounding seventeen thousand of its men and capturing another seventeen thousand while causing thousands of others to desert. He then turned to meet the Turkish Second Army, which continued to bear down on him and included among its corps commanders Mustafa Kemal, the hero of Gallipoli.

As the month ended, Brusilov continued his drive on the transportation center at Kovel, doing further damage to what remained of the Austro-Hungarian army. But he was being slowed down by an all-too-familiar problem: inadequate transport, supplies, and reinforcements. What was new and worse, German divisions were arriving in significant numbers from the west. This was a potentially mortal danger, but Brusilov could take pride in the fact that it was happening. Three months earlier the Germans had 125 divisions in the west, forty-seven in the east. But the ratio had been changing steadily ever since in response to the crisis that Brusilov had created, and by August it was 119 west, sixty-four east. Hundreds of thousands of German troops who could have made a critical difference at Verdun were in Galicia instead, or on their way there.

Though the year was unfolding in nothing like the way envisioned at Chantilly in December, by August it was beginning to appear possible that Joffre’s objectives would still be achieved. The Germans were outnumbered and on the defensive at Verdun and on the Somme, and the same was true of the combined German-Austrian force in the southeast. The Austrians were on the defensive in Italy (where the Sixth Battle of the Isonzo began on August 6, generating more than a hundred thousand casualties before petering out after twelve days), and Turkey too was an empire in extremis, tormented by Yudenich’s Caucasus campaign and the revolt in the Arabian desert. To complete the picture, French General Sarrail was preparing to move his quarter of a million men—twenty-three British, French, Italian, and Serbian divisions—northward out of Salonika. There seemed good reason to expect that, if all this pressure could be maintained, Germany would crack as Austria-Hungary had already done. This belief—that the Germans couldn’t possibly still have enough men and guns to keep their defensive wall intact—persuaded Haig to keep hammering away at the Somme.

At this juncture, however, two things happened to turn everything upside down again. The Brusilov crisis forced Vienna to consent to putting almost all its armies under unified German command. Conrad howled in protest, but no one now cared what Conrad thought; undoubtedly he would have been dismissed if his many critics had been able to agree on a successor. Almost the whole Eastern Front was placed under the command of Hindenburg, which meant under Ludendorff, who could emerge at last from his isolation in the Baltic wastes. As soon as he had authority over the southeast, Ludendorff stopped insisting that none of the divisions he had been hoarding in the northeast could be spared for duty elsewhere. Hundreds of trainloads of his troops, guns, and supplies began pouring toward Galicia. As they took up positions, Brusilov’s chances of restarting his campaign rapidly grew smaller.

Romania chose this moment, after months of hesitation, to throw in with the Entente. This decision was taken in spite of the fact that Romania’s royal family was a junior, Catholic branch of the Hohenzollerns. It was precipitated by Brusilov’s successes, especially his occupation of the Bukovina, a Hapsburg province on the northern border of Transylvania. This little conquest, of modest importance by every other measure, mattered because the Romanians hungered to annex Transylvania, which not only included many Romanians in its mixed population but had been part of Romania until seized by the Austrians in 1868. The Romanians feared that if they failed to act now, Transylvania would fall permanently to the Russians.

On August 17 Romania signed a secret agreement under which it joined the Entente and was promised Transylvania in return. It was assured of protection from its neighbor Bulgaria (now on the side of the Central Powers and eager to recoup what it had lost in the Second Balkan War) by the army that Sarrail was bringing up from Salonika. On that same day, ironically, a mainly Bulgarian force under German General Mackenson hit Sarrail’s army at the village of Florina in Greece. Sarrail was forced into a retreat that would continue for more than three weeks. The die was cast, however.

On August 27 Romania issued a declaration of war, and that night it sent four hundred thousand troops, twenty-three divisions, through the mountain passes separating it from Transylvania. On the other side of those passes were only thirty-one thousand Austro-Hungarian soldiers. A quick and almost painless conquest seemed certain.

The addition to the Entente of Romania with its army of more than half a million men was one of those Great War triumphs that turned out to be less than met the eye—infinitely less, in this case. It was controversial before it happened, with Britain’s David Lloyd George and Russia’s General Alexeyev among those opposed. Alexeyev warned that the Romanian army was useless in spite of its size, and that Russia would find itself forced to protect hundreds of miles that had until now required no protection because of Romania’s neutrality. He argued, in short, that Russia would be worse off with Romania as an ally than if Romania stayed out of the war. The tsar ignored Alexeyev. He listened instead to Boris Stürmer, the craven, conniving, and inept courtier who (to the shock of everyone, including Petrograd’s conservative old guard) had been appointed prime minister in February and in July, after Sazonov was dismissed, had taken on the additional duties of foreign minister. Stürmer, who had absolutely no experience in such matters and was despised by nearly everyone who knew him, told Tsar Nicholas that the Romanians would sweep across Transylvania and into Hungary. He effortlessly carried the day.

Romania’s declaration of war seemed a disaster to the Germans, and for Falkenhayn it was. He had been assuring Kaiser Wilhelm that if Romania entered the war at all, it couldn’t possibly do so before late September, after the harvest was brought in. Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, who had wanted Falkenhayn’s dismissal since the two split over unrestricted submarine warfare, seemed suddenly justified. The coup de grâce was delivered when Hindenburg, prodded by Ludendorff and Hoffmann, threatened to resign if he was not made commander in chief. Kaiser Wilhelm, deeply discouraged about the state of the war and too weak politically to face down Hindenburg, gave up. On August 29 he sent a message inviting Hindenburg and Ludendorff to meet with him in Potsdam. When Falkenhayn, reading the signs, offered his resignation, it was accepted without discussion. Falkenhayn then made a final effort to save himself, warning Wilhelm that Hindenburg’s appointment would mean the end of his, the kaiser’s, ability to command the army or the nation. His power would be usurped not by Hindenburg, who scarcely mattered except as a symbol adored by the public, but by Ludendorff. Much as he resented Hindenburg and despised Ludendorff as a ruffian upstart, Wilhelm could see no alternative. The next day Hindenburg accepted Falkenhayn’s job. Falkenhayn, offered appointment as ambassador to Constantinople, asked for a military position instead. Soon—perhaps it was Ludendorff’s idea of a joke, or of ironic revenge—he was given the job of subduing Romania.

Ludendorff, explicitly given joint authority with Hindenburg over the German armies, was no longer satisfied with being chief of staff. He had the title of Quartermaster General of the German Army conferred on himself instead. He then departed by train for Verdun, taking Hindenburg with him. After getting a brief and appalling look at the situation there (the entire region was a blasted waste, its landscape described by a French aviator as like “the humid skin of a monstrous toad”), he made the inevitable official, decreeing that there would be no more German attacks.

The Romanian army, meanwhile, was showing itself to be even more hopeless than Alexeyev had warned. It was untrained and disorganized, so ill equipped that most of its divisions didn’t possess a single machine gun, with an officer corps so bizarre that its senior commanders had issued an order permitting only those above major in rank to wear makeup. The divisions entering Transylvania should, by sheer force of numbers, have been able to push the Austrians out. Instead they proceeded with excruciating slowness, waiting for Russian help that wasn’t coming. Alexeyev was disgusted by the entire enterprise, certain that Romania could not be defended, and unwilling to add to the small number of Russian troops already there.

The timidity of the Romanians in Transylvania, coupled with a period of quiet at Verdun and the Somme (where the French and British were not yet ready for their next attacks), gave the Germans precious time. Whole armies were being hurried across Hungary—fifteen hundred trainloads of men and equipment during September alone—while Mackensen, having stopped Sarrail, began shifting the bulk of his Bulgarian force northward out of Greece. Only now did the full extent of Romania’s unreadiness begin to make itself felt, turning war into low farce. Planning nothing more than a feint, Mackensen sent a smallish force to threaten the Romanian fortress of Turtukai on the Danube. The commander of this fortress, whose garrison greatly outnumbered the troops sent by Mackensen, declared boldly that “this will be our Verdun.” One day later, upon being attacked, 80 percent of the Romanians at Turtukai surrendered almost without a fight. Those who did not surrender ran away, so that three Romanian divisions essentially evaporated. Mackensen then crossed the Danube into the province of Dobruja on the edge of the Black Sea. His arrival sparked celebrations: Dobruja had been taken by Romania in the Second Balkan War, and most of its population was Bulgarian.

At almost every point where they encountered enemies, the Romanian units simply collapsed. In their haste and confusion some of them attempted to surrender to one of the few Russian units in Dobruja—their own allies, who were distinctly unamused. The local Russian commander, ordered by Alexeyev to try to organize a joint defense, replied that trying to turn the Romanians into a disciplined force was like trying to get a donkey to dance a minuet. Greece too had by this time been drawn into the Entente (temporarily, as it would turn out, and as the result of indescribably complicated political machinations), and it too was putting troops in the field. But those troops saw no more reason to fight than the Romanians did. An entire corps surrendered to Mackensen without a shot being fired and was happily sent off by train to Silesia, where it would pass the rest of the war in the safety of internment camps. When Romania’s commanders responded to the Dobruja crisis by shifting troops from the west, the only result was to thin their inert force in Transylvania.

In mid-September Falkenhayn arrived in Transylvania and took command of a new German Ninth Army, which was being assembled out of the many troops now arriving in the region. He was a man with something to prove—giving him an army to command rather than an army group had been an insult—and one day after taking up his new duties he started his forces toward the mountain passes leading to Romania. Meanwhile new convulsions erupted from France to the Caucasus. A September 15 assault by eight British divisions on the Somme included the battlefield debut of the tank. Only sixty of the new machines were in France at the time; of them only thirty-two were able to go into action, and only nine got far enough to help in temporarily pushing back the German line. (Ultimately the attack was another failure.) Churchill, who had wanted to keep the new weapon secret until enough could be assembled for a major surprise, was in anguish. “My poor ‘land battleships’ have been let off prematurely and on a petty scale,” he wrote. “In that idea rested one real victory.” Haig, who had insisted on not waiting, was not discouraged. He told the war office that he wanted a thousand more tanks as soon as possible. The French and the Germans got to work on tank programs of their own.