World War One: A Short History (11 page)

The fact was that breakthrough, as imagined by Haig, was not possible, short of utterly crushing artillery weight, and even then there were severe limits. Between early July and November, necessity sometimes imposed itself on Haig, and when it did he confined himself to well-prepared local actions, with a very limited objective. Accordingly, there were small successes now and then. Thus on 14 July there was a well-managed advance on a limited front by the South Africans, but then cavalry came up and got nowhere. In the first phase, in July and August, there were narrow-front, uncoordinated operations attracting
enemy gunnery – losses higher than on the first day, and not much more to show for it. There was, it is true, much worry on the German side, because of the strength of British artillery – seven million shells were fired between 2 July and mid September, and German regimental histories reveal the strain of this
Materialschlacht
. In the middle period of the battle, the Germans were ordered to regain every piece of ground lost, regardless of its tactical value. In this way the defence was costlier to the Germans than it needed to be.

By mid September Haig was prepared for a new effort, and one involving a new weapon, the tank. It was spectacular enough – a monster of metal, moving on caterpillar tracks and immune from small-arms fire; many inventors claimed credit for it, and H. G. Wells had imagined it. ‘Tank’ had been its code-name when experiments went ahead – in the Admiralty, thanks to Churchill, rather than in the War Office, which had other things on its mind (as did its German equivalent). Tanks developed a certain mythology, but they had their limits. The internal combustion engine had not really developed far enough to take thirty tons of weight, and the tanks easily broke down; they also moved very slowly, and, though the armour was thick, they could be put out of action by a well-aimed shell. In effect, they needed to be combined with other arms, aircraft and infantry. But the real queen of the battlefield remained artillery, and here the British were learning: they understood the importance of the ‘creeping barrage’. In mid September, not seeing how tanks and infantry might cooperate, Haig did not use it, fearing that tanks would be hit, and in their first appearance on the battlefield, tanks did not flourish, while, as ever, cavalry clogged the rear areas, waiting for a breakthrough that never came. But then, in the latter part of September, the creeping bombardment was adopted and part of the German front line was taken. It no longer mattered much, except in the sense that episodes such as this – modest successes – caused

Haig to think that he might gain a great victory if only he kept on. And he kept on, and on: the Somme petering out only in November, in mud and rain. The justification advanced for the whole business was that it had damaged German morale, and the official historians took Haig’s part, even pronouncing that 600,000 Germans had been knocked out, as against 400,000 British and French – a reversal of the usual pattern of losses in an offensive. C. S. Forrester wrote a novel,
The General
, in an attempt to understand the senior military mind that had made such affairs possible. He remarked that the western-front generals were trying to hammer in a screw and, when it resisted, trying to hammer it harder. Necessity in the event showed how such battles should be fought, but the learning process was long and bloody.

There was only one senior man in this period who had an early understanding of it – a Russian, A. A. Brusilov. He commanded the South-western
front
against the Austrians. After Lake Narotch, the other
front
commanders, elderly and nervous, had more or less given up hope: the Germans were unbeatable, they thought. Late in May, appeals came from Italy for some diversionary attack, and these generals shook their heads, on the grounds that their forces did not have the unimaginable amounts of heavy shell that they thought necessary. Brusilov caused still more head-shaking when he volunteered to attack. But he had thought things through.

The problem with this war was that various solutions ruled each other out. If you tried to break through, it meant bringing up an enormous number of men and great quantities of supplies: there would therefore be no surprise, and the huge initial bombardment would make this certain. The enemy would have reserves to hand. Now, sheer weight might indeed produce a breakthrough, in the sense that everything ahead would have been obliterated. The troops would then advance on foot. They
would do so at about two miles per hour – less, if fired upon – because each man had to carry what he needed for survival, including an entrenching tool, water, and so on. Meanwhile, the enemy would be constructing a new line, bringing up reserves either by train or by lorry (or, in France, London buses). There would be further attacks by tired men, supported by guns wearisomely hauled forward through the mud by teams of perhaps hungry horses and not registered for the new targets. The result would be as in the French Champagne offensive of September 1915, or the British effort on the Somme. The key therefore must be disruption of the enemy reserves. That would mean attacking in several places at once, so that the reserves would not know where to proceed. It would also mean a short bombardment. Each attack should be launched on a relatively wide front, so that local reserves, too, would be bewildered (and the problem of enfilading fire, as at Verdun, overcome). It was all very bold, and required well-trained troops and officers. Brusilov’s headquarters stood out for their quality – not overburdened by ceremonial, orders short and to the point. His leadership qualities were shown in the care with which the troops managed the preparation – constructing huge underground hiding places, the guns registering unobtrusively. Brusilov had four separate armies and each was to attack.

On the Austro-Hungarian side, all was serenity: Archduke Joseph Ferdinand, commanding the Fourth Army in the northern part of the line, enjoyed himself boating on the river Styr with his cronies, and talked of ‘our formidable positions’ (some of the dug-outs even had glass windows). Surprise was almost total when, on 4 June, Brusilov’s northernmost army began, with a four-hour bombardment. The weather had dried out the Austrian positions, and they crumbled quickly, releasing a huge cloud of dust, which hid the attacking Russians. Austrian local reserves were thrown in, and vanished; troops, cut off, gave up all too easily, and Brusilov had also worked out sensible tactics
against such strong points as held out – he simply ignored them, pushing his men forward as far as they could go, to disrupt the enemy command system. By the end of the day, the Austrian Fourth Army was near dissolution – a telegram went off to Vienna saying that it ‘has been captured’. In this situation, reserves should have arrived to seal off the gap. But here again Brusilov had found the answer, because his other armies also attacked. There was a further crisis far to the south, on the Romanian border, where the Austrian Seventh Army (commanded by a good general, Pflanzer-Baltin, and using Hungarian troops, whose loyalty was not in question) found that its retreat, on both sides of the river Pruth, led to muddle, and the central two Russian armies, though not doing as spectacularly as the others, also made respectable progress. Where were the defenders’ reserves to go? They moved first towards the Fourth Army, then the order was countermanded, then it was reinstated – all of this on hot, dusty roads, or very slow-moving trains. In the event they were not thrown in at all, or were thrown in in little packets. Brusilov had advanced sixty miles along the front, and took 350,000 prisoners. Hardly surprisingly, the morale of Austria-Hungary’s Czech and Ruthene soldiery now did indeed make for problems, and it would need stiffening from ruthless Prussian NCOs for them to be overcome. There were demands, now, for an incorporation of the Austro-Hungarian army into the German, as the price for survival, and soon thereafter Hindenburg and Ludendorff were effectively its commanders. The mixing of troops sometimes went down to battalion level, and it would have been very difficult for Austria-Hungary to withdraw from the war with a separate army.

But Brusilov had in any event missed out the final element of his winning formula: knowing when to stop. All of Russia was wild with enthusiasm, and the Allies expected great things. His men were therefore pushed forward, exhausting themselves
in the summer heat and facing the usual supply problems, especially with regard to water, as the streams dried up. In the meantime, Austrian troops from the Italian front, and Germans taken from the northern side of the eastern front and even from the threatened western one, arrived and set up a new line close to the railway heads at Kovel and Vladimir Volynsk. Russian cavalry proved, as ever, ineffective, and fodder for it made the supply problem all the worse. Russian attacks were of diminishing effectiveness, and the bulk of Russia’s reserves were on the German part of the line. The Russian generals there were prodded into offensive action, early in July, in the wooded area of Baranowicze, which in 1914 had been the site of the high command. The attack went more or less as other such attacks had gone – frontal charges, after an ineffective and wasteful bombardment – and the generals of course pointed to such results as an excuse for doing nothing further. The reserves were then sent south to Brusilov. The chief element was an entirely new ‘Special Army’, made up mainly of the Imperial Guard’s two infantry and one cavalry corps – the best men in the old army. These were trained, not in modern warfare, but in tactics that would have suited the generation before, and the commander, Bezobrazov, was an elderly crony of the Tsar’s, with corps commanders to match. From mid July, at fortnightly intervals, this Guard Army charged across the marshes around the town of Kovel, where a breakthrough might have cut a German lateral railway. Fighting, said the German general involved, von der Marwitz, had come to resemble conditions in the West, and Russian corpses heaped up. Bezobrazov asked for a truce to clear the bodies, and was refused: there could be no greater deterrent to future attacks. They petered out in August.

They did, however, bring in Romania. Her leaders had been nervous of intervention, knowing the fate of Serbia, but the Allies pressed hard, offering great rewards of Hungarian territory,
and promising an attack from the southern Balkans (where, since 1915, they had had a base, at Salonica, partly garrisoned by what was left of the Serbian army). There was panic in Berlin and Vienna: Falkenhayn lost his office (and was sent to command the Ninth Army on the new front). But the Romanians had almost no experience of real war, and though the men were tough, the officers knew little, and their ways amazed observers (among the first orders was a prescription that junior officers were not to use eye-shadow). The army staggered over the Carpathian passes into Transylvania and then became involved in a supply snarl-up. Troops were somehow scraped together by the Central Powers, now that the Brusilov offensive had lost its momentum (Russia had incurred a million casualties). Skilled mountain-troops advanced into the passes. The Allies at Salonica faced not just problems of supply, but constant malaria, and the town itself suffered a great fire. A mixed German, Bulgarian and Turkish force was therefore free to attack northwards, over the Bulgarian Danube border. The Romanians vacillated as to which front should have priority, choosing first one, then the other, losing on both. By early November, the Central Powers were through the western-most passes of the Transylvanian Alps, and they were over the Danube as well. The Romanian army, at risk of being cut off, evacuated the capital, Bucharest, on 7 December, and had to withdraw, under quarrelsome Russian protection, through the smoke of endless burning oil wells to a new defensive front in the mountains of Moldavia.

In 1916, the world of nineteenth-century Europe died – an appropriate symbol of this being the death of Franz Joseph, the old emperor of Austria, on 21 November. He had been born in 1830, just as the age of railways, of parliamentary liberalism, was starting; he had become the great-grandfather of the various peoples of his empire, all of whose languages he could
speak. Now, in 1916, nationalism was sweeping all before it, and the masses were involved as never before, some of the media egging them on. The State was now required to take on far more than in 1913, printing paper money to pay for it all or putting up direct taxes to unheard-of levels. At the end of 1916 there was a further symbol, in London, of the old world’s end: the old Liberal-dominated Coalition lost a parliamentary vote on whether enemy property in Nigeria could be confiscated. A few ultra-conservatives, appalled at the slaughter, wished for peace, but they no longer had any power: in all countries, even the experiences of 1916 only produced demands for ‘war to a victorious conclusion’, as the Russian slogan ran. A new British war leader emerged, David Lloyd George, and he wanted a ‘knock-out blow’.

FIVE •
1917

preceding pages: Russian troops in eastern Galicia running past a church during an unidentified battle, 1917

Great wars develop a momentum of their own. As German historians have pointed out, the statesmen in 1914 had thought in terms of a ‘cabinet war’, that is, one that could be turned on and off at the will of a few leaders. But with mass conscription, and the enormous loss of life and limb, sheer hatred of the enemy, and the emergence of a monster of public opinion that no politician could ignore, the war could not simply be ended with some recognition that it had all been a gigantic mistake. The Austrian emperor would have liked to do this; so would the Pope; so would President Wilson. They were waved aside, and at the turn of 1916 and 1917, radical leaders emerged, offering one or other version of Lloyd George’s ‘knock-out blow’. And a further twist in the tragedy was that, on each side, such a blow seemed entirely possible. The new leaders in Germany, Ludendorff especially, might recognize that in the West there was stalemate. But submarines, to starve the British out – why not? A few people on the Left did break with the Social Democrats, but there was no other serious opposition at this moment. On the contrary, the country became more militarized than ever before: a ‘Hindenburg Programme’ made every male from sixteen to sixty liable for war work, and output was expected to double (it did). In France, in parallel, the energetic new general, Robert Nivelle, who had made his reputation at Verdun, promised the great victory that had eluded
old Joffre, who was now made Marshal of France and sidelined. There had been a miracle of improvisation as regards the war economy, despite the loss of the industrial
Nord
, and Nivelle promised confidently that he could win the war by mathematical methods, combining new infantry methods and carefully managed ‘creeping barrages’.