The Eastern Front 1914-1917 (40 page)

After the initial euphoria of 1914, the Left merely tolerated the war, for reasons of national defence; and the sting of their opposition to it was usually removed or lessened by the social benefits that the war conferred. The parties of property, on the other hand, produced great, imperialist war-aims and were less, not more, prepared to compromise as the war proceeded, and Imperialism acquired a more obvious social dimension than ever before. Men assumed that acquisition of an empire would make up for all the supposedly temporary social dislocation of the war. It was, for instance, an almost universal assumption, from Marx to Cecil Rhodes, that the British were wealthy because they had an empire, not that they had one because they could afford it. The state’s rents must be put on their old secure footing; markets must be captured; sources of vital raw-materials acquired; foreign competition eliminated. Each country produced war-aims that summed up its own version of imperialism in the previous century. The British demanded confiscation of the German fleet, and the German merchant-marine; an end to Germany’s colonies; and, particularly, control of the vast oil-areas of the Middle East. The
French demanded lesser versions of the same, and put most of their passion into a demand for German gold, a demand dressed up as ‘reparation’. It was again an almost universal illusion that Germany’s industrial advance had been ‘caused’ by French gold, exacted in 1871; now the French would become prosperous at Germany’s expense, and ‘reparations’ continued to be the great indivisible aim of the French rentier class. Similarly, the Germans went on a quest for land in the east, which they sometimes dressed up in their own peculiar version of idecalism. It was a German who best expressed the realities of war-aims in the First World War: Bussche-Haddenhausen, of the Foreign Office, who instructed agents in the occupied areas, ‘Russia’s railways, her industry and her whole economy must come under our control. We have no alternative, but to exploit the East; it is there that we shall find the interest-payments for our war-loan’.
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To the Mr. Gulbenkians of Europe, all of this might mean a fabulous five per cent; to the middle-classes, it meant an end to the washing-up. The appeal to force was becoming irresistible, just when force was at its least decisive.

Despite the war-time problems it encountered, the Russian government was committed to much the same game as its allies, and bid for more gains, the less favourably the war went. Russia’s dependence on the western Powers was now complete, and could not be broken short of a total repudiation of debts or submission to the German empire. One instance of this dependence was the despatch of Russian troops to the western front, more or less nakedly in the style of the Hessian mercenaries sent to fight England’s colonial wars in the eighteenth century. The French had long grumbled that Russia’s front-line strength was no greater than that of France, despite the difference in population-figures; Joffre also grumbled to Zhilinski that France alone was fighting the war. The Russians replied that they would send more men to the front if the men had arms; and the French, in December 1915, proposed instead that a contingent of Russian troops should go to the western front. Doumer, visiting the country late in 1915, even made it clear that despatch of war-goods would be dependent on despatch of a Russian contingent, of 300,000 men, to fight in the west. In the end, four brigades
^*
were sent off, to France and to the new front at Salonica—an obvious exercise in cannon-fodder that Alexeyev would have liked to prevent, but could not, since ‘we are so dependent on the French for war-material that the categorical refusal we should give is out of the question’.
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At this stage, the allies were bankrupt of strategic ideas. All of them waited for one reason or another. The French had had enough of fighting the war on their own; they wanted the British to take a greater rôle; and they expected the Russians to resume their offensive some time. Operations in ‘the side-shows’, particularly Gallipoli, were a clear failure, but the battle between ‘easterners’ and ‘westerners’ went on regardless. While the western Powers were simply waiting, Falkenhayn struck at Serbia. With 180 battalions and 900 guns, Mackensen attacked the Serbian army, with 120 and 330, in the early days of October. As the offensive succeeded, six double-strength Bulgarian divisions attacked Serbia in flank, in mid-October. The army was pushed towards the south-west, eventually into Albania, where, with the loss of all but 150,000 men, it reached the sea and safety. The Entente were at a loss. They wished to do something to help Serbia, but lacked the will to send serious forces. They pushed Greece into declaring war on the Central Powers, but fumbled the process, and almost caused a Greek declaration of war upon themselves. They then violated Greek neutrality, occupying the port of Salonica with a view to directly assisting the Serbians. But transport-problems, wrangling among the allies, and the failure to contribute substantial troops made this ineffective: in the whole Serbian campaign, there were thirty British casualties. In the end, the Serbian army was moved to Salonica, from its refuge on Corfu, and this front remained a monument to the bungling of autumn 1915.

There was much grumbling that Russia had done little to help Serbia, a country that came within her sphere. At this stage, Alexeyev was principally concerned that he should not be left in the lurch, as Russians alleged had happned in the summer of 1915, when the Germans attacked Russia without disturbance from the western Powers. It became necessary to document both Russia’s power and willingness to act, so as to exact from the allies a promise that, in 1916, all the Powers—England, France, Italy and Russia—would synchronise their offensive against Germany, which was planned for April. This led Alexeyev to exaggerate his strength
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and also to attempt something for the Serbians’ benefit. As the Germans attacked Serbia, he staged some minor offensives in the north-east and in Volhynia, without effect; then, in response to foreign ministry prompting, he decided to assemble a new army on the Black Sea coast, as a
general menace to Bulgaria. There were plans for a descent on the Bulgarian coast. On the ground, this operation made less sense than it did in foreign ministry heads, for there were two Turco-German battleships, Goeben and
Breslau
, in the Black Sea, and their submarines were a threat to the long supply-lines of any amphibious operation on Russia’s part. The Russian navy had, characteristically, too many great battleships and too few smaller vessels capable of dealing with submarine-threats; since the beginning of the war with Turkey, it had done not much more than raid Turkish light-houses and coastal traffic; now, the admirals would not countenance an amphibious operation, and Alexeyev threatened to turn the Black Sea fleet into an infantry brigade. VII Army remained disposed along the Black Sea coast, doing nothing in particular as the Serbians were pushed, throughout November, towards Albania.
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To achieve at least something—perhaps the intervention of Romania—the new force was sent instead to the Austro-Hungarian front. It was to launch an attack in eastern Galicia and along the Dniester, IX Army co-operating. This operation showed that, although the Russian army might to a large degree have already overcome its material crisis, its commanders had no serious idea as to how this recovery might be put to good use. It began almost as a political manoeuvre, rather than as a military one; there seems to have been little thought as to difficulties of season and terrain, merely a vague confidence that the Austrians would collapse. This vague confidence was not shared by Ivanov, commanding the south-western front. The order for attack came from
Stavka
on 23rd November; the three corps of VII Army were diverted to eastern Galicia, on the river Strypa; Ivanov did not order the offensive until 12th December. He did so, moreover, only after presenting a bill for supplies no doubt designed to make the most ardent proponent of the offensive stop in his tracks—12,000,000 portions of preserved meat, over 11,000 waggons of fodder.
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He quarrelled with Savvitch, his chief of staff, whom he replaced (by Klembovski) just before the attack was to begin. The new army commander, Shcherbachev, was full of ill-defined fight; but he arrived barely a week before action started, and his troops also knew not at all the ground they were expected to fight on. Commanders seem merely to have felt that Austrians would be easy to defeat.

Both this battle,
¹²
and that of Lake Narotch that followed in March, illustrated one of the most unfortunate consequences of shell-shortage—the generals’ tendency to blame all their woes on it, and corresponding expectation that, once shell-shortage were no longer in evidence, all would necessarily be well. Men assumed that, once a thousand rounds per field gun were laid in, then a ten-day operation would be possible, and victory only a matter of wrecking enemy defences so that they could be
occupied by the infantry. But no-one had any idea how a break-through operation should be planned. It was only in July 1916 that
Stavka
issued a manual (
nastavleniye
) on infantry action, one that replaced the pre-war ones hitherto used for instruction of infantry-officers. The troops are said to have left its pages largely uncut. Similarly, the
Stavka
manual on break-through operations was not much more than a muddled translation of a German manual of 1915. There were of course visits to and from the French front, but to date these had not resulted in the absorption, at the Russian front, of significant information. The problem of combining infantry and artillery still evaded solution, since artillerists and infantrymen would not agree. It was only early in 1916 that
Stavka
set up an artillery section,
Upart
, and even then there was not much agreement. The differences between infantry and artillery were to some degree composed only in a demand for huge amounts of shell—4,500,000 rounds per month—which, if realised, would have worn out the army’s guns in a few months.
Stavka
itself was not only too puzzled, but also too busy, to think things out. Alexeyev worked all but six hours of the day at boxes of telegrams and letters; and, merely to keep pace with the millions of details coming in, the officers of
Stavka
were kept going fast enough—on 15th February 1916, for instance,
Stavka
had to send 442 telegrams, with 45,473 words; on 10th March 140, with 14,240 words, and on 13th March 504 with 52,814 words. During March, 1916, II Army Headquarters had to receive 3,000 persons a day.
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It was not surprising that staffs failed, on the whole, to think things out, while planners in the rear were too remote from events to write manuals that could be taken seriously. The result was that each front had a different system, sometimes privately-printing different manuals of instruction. Trench-systems, for instance, were, even in June 1916, ‘childish’—sited on the sky-line in places, and often over-looked by the Germans.
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There was almost no concept of digging great dug-outs to hold the reserves—in the Bessarabian offensive, these were merely marched over open ground for three miles before they came up to the first Austrian trench.

In the present case, generals assumed that with crushing numerical superiority and one heavy shell for every square yard of the front—both of them now attained—all would be well. The artillery would pulverise Austrian defences, and the infantry would easily pick up the wreckage. Nine infantry and two cavalry corps were mustered for attack, beginning on 27th December in eastern Galicia. The attempts went on for a fortnight, in which 50,000 men were lost. The initial attacks failed, or at best took a stretch of enemy front trench. Infantry and artillery failed to co-operate; reserves were too far off, and, when they reached the front, not concealed. The Austrians’ guns were well-handled, did not reveal themselves until
the last moment, and then did powerful work against the attacking Russians. Shcherbachev and Lechitski reacted by bunching their troops closer together—2. Corps, for instance, took all of VII Army’s heavy guns for the front of one division, hardly more than a kilometre, and used 11,000 heavy shells.
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The Austrian front trench was naturally enough levelled and occupied. But thereafter, the attackers were enfiladed from either side of their kilometre, could not bring their reserves up either in a concealed or in a rapid fashion, such that they had to fall back, in the open, from their gains. An attack of this kind was described:

After artillery preparation, we went about a mile forward under heavy enemy gunfire. Once we were within five hundred yards, we were hit, suddenly, by devastating machine-gun and rifle-fire that had hitherto been silent. There was the enemy, in solid trenches with great parapets and dug-outs; sitting behind ten or fifteen rows of uncut wire, waiting for us. We lay on the frozen ground, for hours, as the snow drifted down; if we were wounded, there was no help because we were so close to the wire. But behind us, there were artillery colonels and captains of the General Staff, drinking rum tea, and writing their reports—‘After brilliant artillery preparation our glorious forces rushed forward to occupy the enemy trenches, but were held up by counter-attack of strong reserves.’
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The generals had been led to error by the myths of shell-shortage. They had not noted the need for intense preparation, for disruption of enemy reserves in particular. They now responded by supposing, on the whole, that yet more shell would be needed for break-through. They do not appear to have altered their tactics in a significant degree. After the failure of the offensive in Bessarabia, a document was produced by VII Army command and by Ivanov’s headquarters, discussing failure. Lack of shell was mentioned, particularly by Shcherbachev, as taking first place—although in practice he was to break through in the same area a few months later, with brilliant results, with barely more shell than he had had in the Bessarabian offensive. Obvious truths were stated—the need for reserves to be closer to the front line, for better observation of the enemy artillery. But it needed the genius of Brusilov for anything to emerge from this but stale imitations of French practices of 1915.