The Guns of August (13 page)

T
HE
R
USSIAN COLOSSUS
exercised a spell upon Europe. On the chessboard of military planning, Russia’s size and weight of numbers represented the largest piece. Notwithstanding her shoddy performance in the war against Japan, thought of the Russian “steam roller” gave comfort and encouragement to France and Britain; dread of the Slav at their backs haunted the Germans.

Although the defects of the Russian Army were notorious, although the Russian winter, not the Russian Army, had turned Napoleon back from Moscow, although it had been defeated on its own soil by the French and British in the Crimea, although the Turks in 1877 had outfought it at the siege of Plevna and only succumbed later to overwhelming numbers, although the Japanese had outfought it in Manchuria, a myth of its invincibility prevailed. The savage cavalry charge of yelling Cossacks was such a fixture in European minds that newspaper artists in August, 1914, were able to draw it in stirring detail without having been within a thousand miles of the Russian front. Cossacks and inexhaustible millions of hardy, uncomplaining
mujiks
willing to die made up the stereotype of the Russian Army. Its numbers inspired awe: 1,423,000 in peacetime strength; an additional 3,115,000 to be called upon mobilization, and a further reserve of 2,000,000 in territorials and recruits to make a total available force of 6,500,000.

It was envisaged as a gigantic mass, initially lethargic, but once thoroughly roused into motion, rolling forward inexorably with, no matter how many losses, endless waves of manpower to fill the places of the fallen. The army’s efforts to purge incompetence and corruption since the war with Japan were believed to have brought improvement. “Everyone” in French politics was “immensely impressed by the growing strength of Russia and her tremendous resources and potential power and wealth,” Sir Edward Grey noticed when he was in Paris in April 1914 to negotiate a naval agreement with the Russians. He shared the, impression himself. “Russian resources are so great,” he told President Poincaré, “that in the long run Germany will be exhausted without our helping Russia.”

To the French the success of Plan 17, the irresistible march to the Rhine, was to be the proving of their nation and one of the great moments of European history. To ensure their breakthrough of the German center, they were bent on having the Russians draw off a portion of the German forces opposing them. The problem was to get Russia to launch an offensive upon Germany’s rear at the same time as the Germans and French launched theirs on the Western Front, that is, as nearly as possible to the fifteenth day of mobilization. The French knew as well as everyone else that it was physically impossible for Russia to complete mobilization and concentration of her forces in fifteen days, but they wanted her to begin battle on M-15 with whatever she had ready. They were determined that Germany must be forced to fight on two fronts from the first moment in order to reduce the German superiority in numbers against themselves.

In 1911 General Dubail, then Chief of the War Ministry Staff, was sent to Russia to indoctrinate the Russian General Staff with the need for seizing the initiative. Although half the Russian forces in a European war would be concentrated against Austria and only half of those destined to take the field against Germany would be ready by M-15, the spirit in St. Petersburg was bold and willing. Anxious to restore glory to their tarnished arms, and leaving details of planning to
look after themselves, the Russians agreed, with more valor than discretion, to launch an offensive simultaneously with France. Dubail obtained a promise that as soon as their front-line forces were in position, without waiting for concentration to be completed, the Russians would attack, crossing the frontier of East Prussia on M-16. “It is at the very heart of Germany that we should strike,” acknowledged the Czar in a signed agreement. “The objective for both of us ought to be Berlin.”

The pact for an early Russian offensive was hardened and sharpened in annual Staff talks that were a feature of the Franco-Russian Alliance. In 1912 General Jilinsky, Chief of the Russian General Staff, came to Paris; in 1913 General Joffre went to Russia. By now the Russians had succumbed to the spell of
élan.
Since Manchuria they, too, had to compensate for the humiliation of military defeat and the consciousness of military deficiencies. Colonel Grandmaison’s lectures, translated into Russian, enjoyed immense popularity. Suffused with the glittering doctrine of
offensive à outrance,
the Russian General Staff improved on its promises. General Jilinsky undertook, in 1912, to have all of the 800,000 men destined for the German front ready by M-15, although Russia’s railways were manifestly inadequate to the task. In 1913 he advanced the date of his offensive by two days, although Russia’s armament factories were producing less than two-thirds the estimated need of artillery shells and less than half the need of rifle cartridges.

The Allies did not seriously concern themselves with Russia’s military defects, although Ian Hamilton, Britain’s military observer with the Japanese, had reported them pitilessly from Manchuria. They were: poor intelligence, disregard of cover, disregard of secrecy and swiftness, lack of dash, lack of initiative, and lack of good generalship. Colonel Repington who had pronounced judgment weekly on the Russo-Japanese War in
The Times
arrived at opinions which caused him to dedicate a book of his collected columns to the Emperor of Japan. Nevertheless the General Staffs believed that simply to get the Russian giant in motion, regardless of how
he functioned, was all that mattered. This was difficult enough. During mobilization the average Russian soldier had to be transported 700 miles, four times as far as the average German soldier, and Russia had available one-tenth as many railroads per square kilometer as Germany. As a defense against invasion these had been deliberately built on a wider gauge than those of Germany. Heavy French loans to finance increased railroad construction had not yet accomplished their goal. Equal speed in mobilization was obviously impossible; but even if only half the 800,000 Russian troops promised for the German front could be put in position by the fifteenth day for a lunge into East Prussia, however faulty their military organization, the effect of their invasion of German territory was expected to be momentous.

To send an army into modern battle on enemy territory, especially under the disadvantage of different railway gauges, is a hazardous and complicated undertaking requiring prodigies of careful organization. Systematic attention to detail was not a notable characteristic of the Russian Army.

The officer corps was topheavy with a superabundance of aged generals whose heaviest intellectual exercise was card playing and who, to save their court perquisites and prestige, were kept on the active list regardless of activity. Officers were appointed and promoted chiefly through patronage, social or monetary, and although there were among them many brave and able soldiers the system did not tend to bring the best to the top. Their “laziness and lack of interest” in outdoor sports dismayed a British military attaché who, on visiting a frontier garrison near the Afghan border, was appalled to find “not a single tennis court.” In the purges after the Japanese war large numbers had resigned or been forced out in an effort to loosen the mass clogging the top. In one year 341 generals, nearly as many as in all the French Army, and 400 colonels had been retired as inefficient. Yet despite improvements in pay and promotion there was a shortage in 1913 of 3,000 officers. Much had been done since the Japanese war to clean away the decay in the army, but the Russian regime was still the same.

“This insane regime,” its ablest defender, Count Witte, the premier of 1903–06, called it; “this tangle of cowardice, blindness, craftiness, and stupidity.” The regime was ruled from the top by a sovereign who had but one idea of government—to preserve intact the absolute monarchy bequeathed to him by his father—and who, lacking the intellect, energy, or training for his job, fell back on personal favorites, whim, simple mulishness, and other devices of the empty-headed autocrat. His father, Alexander III, who deliberately intended to keep his son uneducated in statecraft until the age of thirty, unfortunately miscalculated his own life expectancy, and died when Nicholas was twenty-six. The new Czar, now forty-six, had learned nothing in the interval, and the impression of imperturbability he conveyed was in reality apathy—the indifference of a mind so shallow as to be all surface. When a telegram was brought to him announcing the annihilation of the Russian fleet at Tsushima, he read it, stuffed it in his pocket, and went on playing tennis. When the premier, Kokovtsov, returning from Berlin in November 1913, gave the Czar a personal report on German preparations for war, Nicholas listened to him with his usual intent, unwavering gaze, “looking straight into my eyes.” After a long pause, when the premier had finished, “as if waking from a reverie, he said gravely, ‘God’s will be done.’” In fact, Kokovtsov concluded, he was simply bored.

At the bottom the regime was based upon an ant-heap of secret police who penetrated every ministry, bureau, and provincial department to such a degree that Count Witte felt obliged each year to deposit the notes and records he was keeping for his memoirs in a bank vault in France for safekeeping. When another premier, Stolypin, was assassinated in 1911 the perpetrators were discovered to be the secret police acting as
agents provocateurs
to discredit the revolutionists.

Between the Czar and the secret police the mainstay of the regime were the
Tchinovniki,
a class of bureaucrats and officials drawn from the nobility who performed the actual business of government. They were responsible to no constitutional
body and subject only to arbitrary recall by the Czar, who, bent by the winds of court intrigue and his wife’s suspicions, exercised it constantly. Under the circumstances able men did not hold office long, and one who refused it, pleading “poor health,” inspired a colleague to comment, “In those days everyone was in poor health.”

Simmering with chronic discontent, Russia in the reign of Nicholas II was harassed by disasters, massacres, military defeats, and uprisings culminating in the revolution of 1905. When at that time the Czar was advised by Count Witte that he must either grant the constitution which the people were demanding or restore order under military dictatorship, he was obliged with bitter distaste to accept the first choice because his father’s cousin, the Grand Duke Nicholas, commander of the St. Petersburg Military District, refused to accept responsibility for the second. For this default the Grand Duke was never forgiven by the hyper-Bourbons, the Baltic barons of German blood and sympathy, the Black Hundreds—those “anarchists of the right”—and other reactionary groups who manned the ramparts of autocracy. They felt, as did many Germans, including the Kaiser in alternate hours, that the common interests of autocracies, formerly linked in the
Drei-Kaiser Bund,
made Germany a more natural ally of Russia than the democracies of the West. Regarding the liberals within Russia as their first enemy, the Russian reactionaries preferred the Kaiser to the Duma as the French Right of a later day were to prefer Hitler to Léon Blum. Only the growing threat of Germany itself in the last twenty years before the war induced Czarist Russia against her natural inclination to make alliance with republican France. Ultimately the threat even brought her together with England, which for a century had barred her from Constantinople and of whom one of the Czar’s uncles, the Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich, said in 1898: “I hope to live long enough to hear England’s death rattle. That is the ardent prayer I address to God each day!”

The cohorts of Vladimir dominated a court that was living out its age of Nero, whose ladies enjoyed the thrills of
afternoon séances with the unwashed Rasputin. But Russia also had its Democrats and Liberals of the Duma, its Bakunin the Nihilist, its Prince Kropotkin who became an anarchist, its “intelligentsia” of whom the Czar said, “How I detest that word! I wish I could order the Academy to strike it from the Russian dictionary,” its Levins who agonized endlessly over their souls, socialism, and the soil, its Uncle Vanyas without hope, its particular quality that caused a British diplomat to conclude that “everyone in Russia was a little mad”—a quality called
le charme slav,
half nonchalance, half inefficiency, a kind of
fin de siècle
fecklessness that hung like a faint mist over the city on the Neva which the world knew as St. Petersburg and did not know was the Cherry Orchard.

Insofar as readiness for war was concerned, the regime was personified by its Minister for War, General Sukhomlinov, an artful, indolent, pleasure-loving, chubby little man in his sixties of whom his colleague, Foreign Minister Sazonov, said, “It was very difficult to make him work but to get him to tell the truth was well-nigh impossible.” Having won the Cross of St. George as a dashing young cavalry officer in the war of 1877 against the Turks, Sukhomlinov believed that military knowledge acquired in that campaign was permanent truth. As Minister of War he scolded a meeting of Staff College instructors for interest in such “innovations” as the factor of firepower against the saber, lance and the bayonet charge. He could not hear the phrase “modern war,” he said, without a sense of annoyance. “As war was, so it has remained … all these things are merely vicious innovations. Look at me, for instance; I have not read a military manual for the last twenty-five years.” In 1913 he dismissed five instructors of the College who persisted in preaching the vicious heresy of “fire tactics.”

Sukhomlinov’s native intelligence was adulterated by levity to cunning and cleverness. He was short and soft, with a catlike face, neat white whiskers and beard, and an ingratiating, almost feline manner that captivated those like the Czar whom he set himself to please. In others, like the French ambassador, Paléologue, he inspired “distrust at first sight.”
Ministerial office, both appointment and dismissal, being entirely at the whim of the Czar, Sukhomlinov had won and kept himself in favor by being at once obsequious and entertaining, by funny stories and acts of buffoonery, avoidance of serious and unpleasant matters, and careful cultivation of “the Friend,” Rasputin. As a result he proved immune to charges of corruption and incompetence, to a sensational divorce scandal, and to an even more resounding spy scandal.