The Eastern Front 1914-1917 (9 page)

In any case, an initial surprise for Russian generals was that their cavalry in the field was ineffective. 4,000 men wandering around a wide area, barely in touch with each other or their commanders, could not achieve very much. The information sent back by them was inaccurate and late. In action, they could quite easily be knocked out by well-handled infantry units. In the old days, even a foolishly-led Light Brigade could at least charge artillery batteries with some hope of reaching them, since guns could not fire either with much accuracy or at a great range. Now, infantry rifles alone could fire up to fifteen rounds in a minute, at a range of 800 metres; enough to defeat a charging horse. There were sporadic cavalry engagements in East Prussia after 15th August, but they usually ended in a bloody withdrawal of the cavalrymen. Elderly cavalrymen, who had looked forward to the crowning achievement in a life of boots-and-saddles, broke down in bewilderment. The cavalry commander of I Army, the aged Khan of Nakhichevan, was the nearest that the Russian army came to a Hun. He was found in a tent, within a few miles of the border, weeping, out of touch with his troops, and suffering so badly from piles that he could not get on his horse at all.
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Of course, to be fair, there was maybe not much else that commanders could do but rely on cavalry. It was one of the conundrums of the First World War that there was not much alternative to the horse. The internal combustion-engine was, through no fault of the generals, in a primitive state. Even the German army had only eighty-three lorries, and most of these broke down while crossing the Ardennes. The Russian army requisitioned 3,000 private automobiles, but had to leave most of them rusting in the Semenovski Platz in Saint Petersburg for lack of maintenance and fuel.
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In any case, horses, in the muddy conditions of the eastern front, were often more useful than lorries and, for that matter, tanks. The authorities overdid their reliance on cavalry, but that reliance was not as witless as it later appeared to be. In general, the First World War was marked by an extreme, and extraordinary, dichotomy between weight and mobility, the two vital principles of warfare. Armies had been able to benefit from the economic strides of the nineteenth century, but not yet from those of the twentieth. Agriculture and railways had developed far enough for the supply and maintenance of millions of men to become possible: the Great Powers conscripted between twelve and fifteen million men each between 1914 and 1918. The front-line strengths of the Powers usually reached two million without much effort. But, though these could be given lavish armament and supply, there was not much to make them mobile once they got beyond railheads. There was, in other words, a twentieth-century delivery-system, but a nineteenth-century warhead. In the Russian army, for instance, communications were
primitive. The Russian II Army had twenty-five telephones, a few morse-coding machines, and one Hughes apparatus, a primitive tele-printer capable of discharging 1,200 words per hour, which broke down and forced the commander to move around on horseback to find out what was going on.
¹⁰
The Germans themselves had only forty wireless-stations for their whole armed forces; the Russians had even fewer, and in any case men did not know how to use them. Corps lost each other’s codes, and had to broadcast
en clair
, to the Germans’ satisfaction. Similarly, for its 150,000 men II Army had ten automobiles, and four defective motor-cycles. It also had forty-two aeroplanes, but most of them were grounded from one mechanical fault or other.
¹¹
All in all, the Russian invasion of East Prussia was bound to be slow, moving at the pace of a marching man and a plodding horse. If troops could manage even ten miles in a day, they expected and perhaps deserved congratulation.

But these inevitable consequences of the age were made much more serious for the Russian army because of its peculiar structure. The civil war that had gone on within the army before 1914 resulted in absence of a real plan for war: troops were frittered away between different operations, since there was no single authority to impose its will on the army. Moreover, when war broke out, that single authority did not emerge even when an ostensible supreme command (
Stavka
) was appointed.
Stavka
, in the early phase of the war, was a helpless victim of circumstances. The pre-war conflicts between soldiers who wanted to concentrate against Germany, and soldiers who wanted to concentrate against Austria-Hungary, had not been resolved. Instead, the army was split into two groups, and set to conduct separate operations. There were two separate ‘fronts’ or army groups: the north-western front, under Zhilinski, with three armies, to face Germany, and the south-western front, under Ivanov and Alexeyev, to face Austria-Hungary, with four armies. The construction of these separate groups was not undertaken because army leaders recognised that strategic handling of large armies needed army groups. Rather, it followed from men’s recognition that compromise was impossible; better have two different operations. Real power was held by the separate army groups, and not by
Stavka
.

The supreme command itself was botched together at the last moment. Sukhomlinov, as war minister, had been expected to assume the supreme command. But he calculated that
Stavka
would remain powerless—as indeed, in a short war, would have been the case—and no doubt also foresaw defeats, in the first period of the war, because of Germany’s rapid mobilisation. With a show of patriotic endeavour, he offered the post to the Tsar.
¹²
The Tsar calculated much as Sukhomlinov did. There
was need of ‘a great poster’ to fill the post; and on 2nd August, it was offered to Grand Duke Nicholas, who had been expecting only the command of VI Army, along the Baltic coast. He knew neither the plans nor his subordinates. Yanushkevitch, translated from his post in Saint Petersburg to be chief of staff to the new commander-in-chief, went to see him at his estate. The other officers met him only at field-headquarters in Baranovitchi.
Stavka
itself was scraped together at the last moment. Yanushkevitch, the ostensible chief of staff, was a figurehead—chosen in the usual Sukhomlinov way to prevent anyone dangerous from taking over the job, and surviving in it from sheer force of characterlessness. The real force in
Stavka
was Danilov, who, despite his title (‘Quarter-Master-General’) was effective director of military operations. It was characteristic that Danilov took over the only suitable building in Baranovitchi, with his staff of fifteen officers, while Yanushkevitch had part of a railway-carriage, and a single adjutant. The Grand Duke himself was still more of a figurehead than Yanushkevitch. He entertained foreign military representatives, signed orders, and surrounded himself with aristocratic aides-de-camp, among them his brothers (whom he referred to as ‘my sleeping-pills’). In important matters, he was silent: at a conference of the front-commands late in September, for instance, he stayed in a different room from the generals ‘so as not to get in their way’. Foreigners were quite impressed with him, and his men are also supposed to have had much affection for him—though, since they saw him only once, this is difficult to account for. A few other officers were tacked on to make up numbers—Ronzhin was named as head of field transport, while Kondzerovski, who had been secretary of the ‘attestation commission’, dealing with senior promotions, was told at the last moment to join
Stavka
as adjutant-general (
dezhurny general
). He and Ronzhin shared a carriage, and neither had any staff to speak of. If
Stavka
had been a real supreme command, these conditions would of course have been laughably inadequate. But it was a mere shadow; and the number of officers, though far too small to discharge the duties of a supreme command, was also large enough in comparison with the officers conception of their duties. None of them seem to have had much difficulty in composing voluminous diaries, or in writing long, daily letters to their wives; they spent long hours at the table—Kondzerovski having arranged for meals to be prepared ‘by the Tatar K. with one of the best restaurant-cars in Russia, and a full complement of well-trained personnel’. Ronzhin made a collection of the Grand Duke’s cigar-bands; Kondzerovski was always busy with the intrigues of senior promotions-matters; Yanushkevitch developed his taste for pornography.
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Baranovitchi was chosen as headquarters town because of the universal
idea that headquarters would have to be mobile. It lay on railway-lines to north and south, east and west, and
Stavka
put up with the various discomforts in the name of mobility. In much the same way Kondzerovski bought himself binoculars, a revolver, a saddle, a map-frame and a cloak. His only visit to the front occurred in fact by the
Stavka
Rolls, the driver of which had to lend him gloves. There was not even, in the first weeks, any convenient way of communicating with the front commands. Six men operated a morse-coding machine (capable of 600 words per hour) until the end of September, when some mechanics arrived from Minsk, at the behest of the ministry of posts and telegraphs, to instal links to Rovno and Cholm; even in October, the Council of Ministers were being asked for 161,000 roubles to help equip
Stavka
with the required cable. Baranovitchi, though not much more than a collection of huts and railway-carriages, became headquarters of the Russian army for the next year of war. But in August 1914, no-one imagined that the war would last for very long, or what it would be like.

In these circumstances,
Stavka
was in no position to enforce a plan, even if it had had one. It took over the compromise-arrangements haggled over between Danilov and Alexeyev, with a supporting-chorus of Postovski, Klyuev, Dragomirov and the rest, between 1910 and 1914. In theory, the front against Germany should have been considered the main one, since the war would be decided only by Franco-Russian victory over Germany. But various modifications had been made to this, and in 1912 the plan was changed: twenty-nine and a half infantry divisions against Germany, forty-six and a half against Austria-Hungary. In this way, the army was set two different operations, and there was little contact between the two army groups leading them. Even so, there seemed to be sufficient strength on the north-western front, for intelligence established, quite early on, that there were at most four German corps and some reserve divisions
in East Prussia: enough for the nine corps of I and II Armies to deal with. Zhilinski was told to invade East Prussia.

In reality, the plan to invade East Prussia needed more force than it was given. Ostensibly, the province was a good target for attack, since Russian armies could be launched from two directions, south and east. But the province was also well-set for defensive action by the Germans. It had lakes, forests, small hills and defiles, which gave excellent cover for defenders and severe obstacles for attackers. The railway-links on the Russian side were poor, on the German side sufficient for a flexible defence. When the two Russian groups came across the border, they would, just at the point where they would be most tired from marching, become separated by about a week’s march by the line of lakes known as the
Angerapp-Stellung
, difficult to force without powerful siege-artillery. The two groups would have to move north and west of this position, exposing their outer flanks to attack, in the one case from the fortress of Königsberg, in the other from that of Thorn. It would be possible for the Germans to attack one group, relatively free of worry for the other, provided they used their communications properly. The Russians appreciated this; and Joffre regarded East Prussia as ‘an ambush.’ In reality, the plan made sense only if there were two whole armies protecting the outer flanks of the main ones—which Danilov had intended in the first place. But the structure of the army told against him, and only two armies plunged ahead into East Prussia.
¹⁵

Stavka
weakened this plan still more, because it thought up a third operation. The East Prussian route was not, after all, the shortest road to Berlin, and the French had quite often wondered why Russians neglected to make their most obvious manoeuvre—an attack from the Polish plains. Attack from west of Warsaw, direct towards Berlin, would strike the Germans hardest, and just before the war French representatives were keen on urging it. Russian confidence grew as railways were improved in this region—as a precaution against German invasion, this had been neglected before 1912. In 1914, Yanushkevitch decided that armies would be sent to the Warsaw region as a prelude to invasion of Germany by this most direct route. On 7th August he told the front commands that a new army, IX, would be set up here, and as new army corps arrived from the interior, they would form a further army, X, also to be assembled near Warsaw, for invasion ‘in depth’ of Germany. As things turned out, this plan was not put into effect, at least for the moment. But its existence meant that the East Prussian operation was weakened, and a third operation mounted instead.
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It was later said, notably by Golovin, the best-known writer on the subject, that the Russian invaders of East Prussia had been considerably
inferior to the Germans, each of whose divisions was said to be worth one-and-a-half Russian divisions. There was not much truth in this. The Russian army ought to have been able to send overwhelming forces against Germany—it had sixty-seven first-line and thirty-one second-line infantry divisions, with thirty-seven and a half cavalry divisions and 5,800 guns against thirteen German infantry divisions (half of them second-line) and one German cavalry division in East Prussia, and some forty Austro-Hungarian infantry divisions in Galicia. Subtractions for the Austro-Hungarian front and for the new IX Army reduced the forces at the disposal of Zhilinski, commanding the front against Germany. Even so, there was a respectable superiority on the Russian side; the north-western front commanded twenty-nine and a half infantry divisions, the German VIII Army in East Prussia only thirteen.
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