World War One: A Short History (9 page)

There was also a looming danger that everyone regarded as mortal: the likelihood of the intervention of Italy. How could Austria-Hungary take on a third front, and maybe even, if Romania came in as well, a fourth? Both were new states, their national unifications not completed, since the Habsburg empire had substantial Italian and Romanian populations. The Italians went one better, and looked at South Slav lands over the Adriatic, an empire in the Mediterranean at Turkey’s expense, as well as a cheap loan of £50,000,000. They greatly feared Germany, but the Austro-Hungarian emergency and the Allied landing at Gallipoli made up for this, and Italy, on 26 April, signed a Treaty of London with the Allies, guaranteeing intervention. A decision for war was pushed through a parliament that was not widely enthusiastic, and on 23 May the Italian ambassador in Vienna handed it over. In theory this should have been the end of Austria, but geography greatly helped. Most of the Austro-Italian border was very mountainous, and there was only about twenty miles of flat land, northwest of the great port of Trieste which was the Italians’ main objective. However, it was
karst
, flintstone, in which nothing grew and trenches could not be dug. Even the scratch forces that the Austrians put up managed to hold the initial attacks. Far from destroying Austria-Hungary, Italian intervention gave the war some point as far as many Slavs were concerned, and the Prague regiment was, in due course, reconstituted because its men gave a very good account of themselves on the Italian front. Besides, Italian intervention led Falkenhayn into one of the greatest successes of the war, in the east.

Falkenhayn had had two main concerns. The first was to persuade Russia to abandon the war, and he needed some
demonstration that she would never win it. The second was to persuade the Austro-Hungarians that they should make generous concessions to Italy, so as to fend off her intervention. This was difficult; if he told them that he proposed to send direct help, with a view to defeating Russia, then he might encourage them to refuse the Italian concessions. The preparations for an attack on Russia were therefore concealed even from Conrad, and the Kaiser himself was only told of the plan on 11 April. It was a good plan – an attack by a new army (the Eleventh) across rolling countryside north of the Carpathians, in the passes of which the Russians were attempting offensives. By now the land had dried out, and there would be no repetition of the calamitous Conrad doings in the snows. Over ten days, the eight divisions – 100,000 men and 1,000 guns – of Mackensen’s new Eleventh Army arrived east of Cracow by the end of April – the kind of railway performance of which Russians, especially, were not capable.

They arrived at a very sensitive spot, an area where the Russians’ difficulties with war goods were compounded by a very messy strategic situation: their entire position was about to explode. The Russian army consisted of two Army Groups (or
fronty
). The North-western one had to deal with the Germans in East Prussia, who could attack south, east, even north, into the Baltic provinces. A cautious commander would have to keep men ready to defend any of these, which left nothing spare for an attack. The South-western
front
equally naturally worried about threats to the long Carpathian flank, and in any case thought, understandably, that a certain effort would put Austria-Hungary out of the war. The problem on the Russian side especially was that the troops’ movements were extraordinarily slow, because their railway system was considerably less advanced than the German, and there was almost no central railway direction beyond a middle-ranking officer with two assistants sitting in half of a railway carriage in a forest clearing
at Baranowicze. About one fifth of German railway movement was to do with horses (especially fodder), but more than one half on the Russian side, partly because cavalry and Cossacks were still expecting their hour of glory. But in any case, the
fronty
managed their own railway movements, ignored
Stavka
, and did not put each other’s claims first. It could take a month for an army corps to be shifted, although in theory the journey from Riga to Odessa could have been done in five days.

Two thirds of the entire strength, sixty divisions, catered for North-western phobias about East Prussia. The commander of the South-western Army Group (Ivanov) was assembling a large force (six army corps) for an action close to the Romanian border, in the eastern Carpathians – the aim, of course, to bring in Romania and Italy at the same time. Most Russian troops to the west of this were supposed to keep on in the Carpathian passes, and the result was that the front east of Cracow was thinly held, by five divisions, with no reserves within easy reach, and a sketchy front line, some desultory earth-shifting and not much wire. Russian soldiers disliked digging in ground that had been fought over, because, in the thaw, corpses surfaced. The local commander heard that German troops were arriving, and wanted to build a reserve position. He was told that, if he had men to spare for that sort of work, he must have more than he needed, and was told to part with some. Communications to the front line even ran over open ground. Everything, strategic and tactical, was in place for one of the great disasters of Russian military history.

On 2 May the eighteen divisions and thousand guns of the Austrian Fourth and German Eleventh Armies began a bombardment lasting four hours, which quite soon reduced the Russian positions to rubble and could not be answered, most of the Russian Third Army’s artillery being elsewhere (and even the commander, though forewarned by deserters, had gone off to a celebration of the St George Order). Many of the troops
were raw or even over-age, and some panicked at the trench mortars, running away, greatcoats flapping, over open ground; one third of the defenders were wiped out, and a gap of five miles opened in the Russian line. In two days the Central Powers’ troops moved eight miles. Only an immediate Russian retreat to the river San and Przemysl might have saved something, but the Third Army was ordered to hold on, local reserves vanished into the defeat, and by 10 May the Austro-Germans had taken 200 guns and 140,000 prisoners. Now, the Russians had to pull back from the Carpathians, and reserves from the other
front
were sent tardily, reluctantly, and in bits and pieces. Besides, another sinister factor was starting to tell: the Russians did not have sufficient munitions – one corps, needing 20,000 shells at once and 25,000 every day thereafter, could only be sent 15,000. By 19 May the Germans had a bridgehead over the San, and when Falkenhayn met the chief of staff of the Eleventh Army, Hans von Seeckt, at Jaroslaw on the river, the two men agreed that an enormous opportunity was opening up: the whole of Russian Poland might be taken. The commander of the Russian South-west
front
agreed, sending panic-stricken messages that he would have to retreat as far as Kiev. Meanwhile, he had to retreat eccentrically – between north and east, not quite knowing which route the Central Powers would follow. On 4 June Przemysl was re-taken, and on the 22nd Lvov itself.

There followed a vast crisis on the Russian front. The great battering-ram in Galicia now moved towards the southern side of Russian Poland, and in mid July the Germans in East Prussia assembled another battering-ram for the northern side. There was a further complication, in that the Germans had opened another front, on the Baltic. In mid April they had sent cavalry into the open spaces there, and had drawn in more Russian troops than the area was worth; an Army had to cover Riga, another Lithuania, and a new front, the Northern, was opened
up, giving the usual headaches as to the disposal of reserves. The Russian strategic position was a very poor one, and the sensible thing would have been to give up Poland altogether. However, the rare voice to that effect was easily silenced. In the first place, evacuating Warsaw would require 2,000 trains, and these could not be spared because of the requirements of fodder. There was another argument. Poland was supposed to be protected by the great fortresses – Kovno in the north, Novogeorgievsk outside Warsaw, the very symbol of Russian rule, and lesser ones elsewhere, on various rivers. These fortresses had been very expensive before the war, and contained thousands of guns, with millions of rounds of shell. Why just abandon them?

The Russian army would therefore stand and fight. Shell-shortage had been brought about, not really by the terrible backwardness of the country (as Stalin and emigrant generals, all seeking excuses for their misdeeds, asserted) but by wrong-headedness. The War Ministry had never thought Russian industrialists honest or competent. The Artillery Department of the Ministry thought that the infantry were producing hard-luck stories. Foreigners were invited to supply shell, but Russia came at the end of everyone’s list, sent specifications in measurements as obsolete as the cubit, and anyway could not directly pay (she used British credit). But the fact remains that two million shells had been stockpiled in the great fortresses, which now collapsed. In mid July, Gallwitz, with a thousand guns and 400,000 shells from the north, and Mackensen from the south, bombarded their way forward, sometimes reducing Russian army corps to a few thousand men, and by 4 August the Germans had taken Warsaw. The fortress of Novogeorgievsk had a large garrison, with 1,600 guns and a million shells. It should have been evacuated, given the fate of every other fortress in Europe faced with heavy artillery, but as the
front
commander, Alexeyev, opined, ‘spiritual motives speak for its
defence’. Beseler, conqueror of the fortress of Antwerp, arrived with a siege train. He captured the chief engineer of the fortress, doing the rounds with all of his maps. A single German shell blew up one of the forts, and the place surrendered on 19 August. At the same moment, the same fate occurred to the other great fortress, Kovno, which was supposed to defend Lithuania, and where there was a similar vast haul of 1,300 guns and 900,000 shells.

As the Turkish proverb has it, one disaster is worth a thousand pieces of advice, and
Stavka
at last did the right thing. It retreated – a version of 1812, complete with scorched-earth tactics, leaving nothing behind for the Germans to use. From the military viewpoint, the retreat was managed well enough, Brest-Litovsk being burned, with hundreds of thousands of refugees trudging away from the Jewish Pale and crowding into the cities. The Germans outran their own supplies, even of water, as they plodded ahead into the marshlands of the Pripyat. Because
Stavka
overrated the German threat to Riga, the retreat proceeded in different directions. On 18 September the Germans stole through the ‘Sventsiany gap’ and managed to take Vilna, capital of Lithuania. Ludendorff wanted to go on, but Falkenhayn had some sense of reality. The Russians had lost a million prisoners, and would clearly be in no position to interfere with German plans elsewhere; in any case, as a technician, Falkenhayn well understood the difficulties of supplying armies in White Russia, far beyond the German railheads, without metalled roads, and dependent on a barely functioning Russian railway that had a broader gauge unusable by German locomotives. A priority now was to knock out Serbia and to establish a land route to Turkey, before the Balkan winter set in. He waved aside Austro-Hungarian plans concerning the Ukraine and Italy, and sent Mackensen to the Balkans. The Bulgarian government had their own ambitions, to reconstitute the medieval Bulgarian empire, and Bulgaria
was strategically placed to invade Serbia from the east. She was overwhelmed in October–November, and on 1 January 1916, the first direct train from Berlin arrived in Istanbul.

NOTES

1.
A Colonel Doughty-Wylie, on the Staff, went ashore armed with only a cane. He had been Military Consul (part of an early international effort at peace-keeping in south-eastern Anatolia), had taken part, with the Red Crescent, in the Balkan Wars on the Ottoman side, and been decorated. He said that he was not going to kill Turks, was himself killed, and was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross.

FOUR •
1916

preceding pages: British gasmasked machine-gun unit on the Somme, 1916

In December 1915 the Allies held a military conference at French General Headquarters, in the palace of the Princes de Condeá, at Chantilly. The year had gone badly for them. However, 1916 promised much better: the Russians had overcome their munitions crisis, and the British were producing a land army; they were also financing the imports (mainly from the USA) which were so vital for the Allied war effort. Falkenhayn could tell that time was not on Germany’s side. He could also see that Britain was the key enemy: she would fight on, unless somehow France could be made to ask for peace. Germany still had an advantage in terms of munitions-output, so the obvious target was the French army, and the obvious method was artillery – competently used, it caused three quarters of all casualties. The German superiority in it was still substantial, and it needed to be used in a place where the French would have no alternative but to stand and be battered. That in turn was obvious – Verdun. Here was a historic place, a fortress dominating the heights of the Meuse, north-east of Paris, which had acted as hinge of the French army in the Battle of the Marne and had a place in the mythology of France greater than that of Ypres in the mythology of England. It would have to be defended, though its defenders, given the terrain, could be shelled to pieces.