The World Crisis

by Winston S. Churchill

  The military critics have glared upon Jilinski’s various orders, but few of them with their present-day knowledge of the values and proportions of the campaign in East Prussia, would care to have such opportunities offered to them. At the end he was furious with Rennenkampf. Just as Samsonov during the four days of his agony had ceased to hold the slightest communication with his Chief, so Rennenkampf, from the hour when he scuttled with such commendable promptitude and fortunate effrontery from the Insterburg line, had not bothered about anything except getting his army away—unless indeed it be getting his own headquarters away. For these last moved very rapidly. They changed repeatedly, sometimes three or four times a day, until the crisis had passed, and thereafter he betook himself to Kovno ‘far from the madding crowd.’

  Jilinski, neglected and marooned, but still accountable, poured out his resentment to the Grand Duke and the Stavka. ‘General Rennenkampf has thought more about the safety of his staff than of directing the movements of his army, which he has not in actual fact commanded for several days. He reports that he is moving to Vilkoviski and that he is withdrawing the IIIrd and XXVIth Corps eastward, leaving the remaining Corps of his army to their fate. His staff has gone with him. The behaviour of the Army Commander had made all direction of operations impossible. He has altered the position of his Headquarters four times in the last twenty-four hours, each time completely breaking off communication.’ The Stavka, which had at any rate the victory of Lemberg to live upon, received these protestations coolly. They replied that ‘it was quite in the nature of General Rennenkampf to wish to direct his troops personally’ and suggested that Jilinski should ‘try to get in touch with him’ at Vilkoviski. He was already in Kovno.

  On September 17—the day Rennenkampf’s rearguard was sacrificed at Vilkoviski, Jilinski was relieved of his command and General Ruzski from the successful Galician theatre was placed in charge of the North-West Front. He rallied the First Army in front of the Niemen river. Says Hoffmann in his diaries: ‘Well, well; up till now with inferior numbers we have defeated about fifteen Russian Army Corps and eight cavalry divisions and we are not finished yet. Now for it once again.’

  Meanwhile what have been the fortunes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire?

  General Conrad von Hötzendorf had fought the battle of Lemberg to the last ounce, the last inch and the last minute which his armies could sustain. When on September 11 he was forced to give the hateful signal to retreat there was very little fighting power left. The retreat was terrible. Auffenberg’s army in escaping from the Russian claws had to traverse and impinge upon a large part of the communications of the Third Austrian Army. Transport vehicles of every kind marched four-abreast upon roads also encumbered with civilian refugees. ‘Extraordinary rains pretty generally follow great battles,’ and the infantry plodded across sopping fields. The guns drove their way somehow through the traffic blocks. Few and devoted were the soldiers of the rear-guards. Many were the alarms and panics which the dreaded cry ‘Kosaken kommen’ started. Vast interminable processions of misery—physical suffering of every kind, weariness, grief for friends and comrades dead, grief for battles lost beyond recall—trailed across the landscape. These rivers of the Inferno flowed sluggishly; but they flowed ceaselessly; they flowed homewards. They flowed faster than the Russians could follow. The power of the modern rifle, of a few machine-guns, of a battery or two of field artillery, to delay the pursuer, to make him await his artillery, nay, to kill him if he is impatient, may perhaps for the first time have been inculcated in the minds of the Imperial and Royal Armies. At any rate they toiled on; they struggled on; but they continued to get away; away from the fire of the foe and the ghastly battles and the hopeless sense of being overpowered.

  Przemysl was a first-class fortress. A wide circle of detached forts guarded the military area and the many roads, each crawling with humanity and wagons, which converged upon it. Inextricable congestion ensued. Przemysl itself became for some days a solid block of guns and transport. On the roads leading to it all wheels presently ceased to turn. Meanwhile the Russian cannon growled behind, and rifle-shots as well as shells smote the paralyzed columns. In the end there was no recourse but to unyoke the horses and leave miles of laden transport four-abreast to be the poor but not unwelcome prize of the victors.

  Still Przemysl gave some relief. An army corps was left to hold the fortress besides its own special troops. The rear-guards disappeared within the spacious perimeter. The cannon of the forts fired upon the Russians, and they had to halt or go a long way round. But the retreat continued. When the San was reached on the 16th, the state of the armies was such that Conrad realized the impossibility of turning there. He ordered the retreat to proceed to the Dunajetz, which flows into the Vistula more than 130 miles west of Lemberg.

  ‘Day and night’ [reads the Austrian official account] ‘behind a gigantic train of transport-wagons marched the infantry, with bowed heads, yet undiscouraged; the artillery, sinking in up to their axles in the morass of the roads, worked their way forward; the cavalry regiments, like horsemen of the Apocalypse, in molten confusion, made their way on, their presence often betrayed from afar by the penetrating smell given off by the festering galls of hundreds of led horses.’36

  After the passage of the San the Russians’ pursuit, for reasons which will presently appear, slackened, and by September 26 Conrad found it possible to form a front before reaching the Dunajetz stream. Of the 900,000 Austro-Hungarian troops who had taken the field in August in Galicia six weeks before considerably less than two-thirds had repassed the San. Says the Austrian official account: ‘The Russians did not exaggerate when they claimed in their message of victory that the enemy had lost 250,000 dead and wounded and 100,000 taken prisoners.’

  But this was not the worst of the injury to the military power of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The Imperial and Royal army was composed like no army in the world. Mutual jealousies, the arrogance of the Hungarians, the pan-Slav ambitions of the Czechs, Croats and Slovenes, the questionable sympathies of the Tirolese, created a doubtful loyalty in at least one man in four. The personnel of the army was 25 per cent German, 23 per cent Magyar, 17 per cent Czecho-Slovak, 11 per cent Serb, Croat and Slovenes, 8 per cent Polish, 8 per cent Ukranian, 7 per cent Roumanian and 1 per cent Italian. In order to prevent collective disaffection a considerable mixture of races had been arranged in many units, but the pre-war cadres of the army contained about 75 per cent of officers of German race and this proportion was followed very largely in the permanent staff of under-officers and sergeants. There were eighty words of command in German which effected the drill and control of the whole heterogeneous mass. Outside the German frame-work many officers did not even know these. It was this permanent Teutonic staff and structure that held the whole army together. These courageous, resolute professionals had exposed themselves with ardour. Their losses had been out of all proportion to those of the rank and file. More than half had perished. They were irreplaceable. Never again could the great masses of brave and docile manhood, which the Dual Monarchy could still command, be guided by the Teutonic element. The need of employing very large numbers of new officers of Czech, Roumanian or Croat nationality offered positions of authority to many who hated the Teutonic race and cared nothing for the House of Hapsburg. This mutilation of the Austro-Hungarian army in the terrible battle of two nations called Lemberg ranks with the turn at the Marne as the most important and irrevocable result of the war in 1914. It is the supreme condemnation of Conrad’s narrow military creed, tense, sincere, lion-hearted as it was. His finest qualities were the cause of his country’s undoing. Of all the campaigns that were ever fought the Austro-Hungarian campaign in Galicia required most of all the use of Time. Of all the armies that have ever existed since Hannibal marched into Italy, the Austro-Hungarian army needed the most careful handling. Conrad broke their hearts and used them up in three weeks. Had he sat in the seat of Moltke with the Schlieffen plan to execute and the German armi
es to direct, he might to-day be the outstanding captain of history books different from those which will now be printed.

  CHAPTER XV

  THE SECOND ROUND

  By the middle of September what may be called ‘the first round’ of the World War was over. The Battle of the Marne was decided, and the great thrust on Paris, embodied in the Schlieffen Plan, had definitely failed. The expulsion of Rennenkampf from East Prussia had ended the Russian invasion of Germany. Almost simultaneously the Battle of Lemberg had resulted in a Russian victory. France had survived the onslaught; Germany had destroyed the Russian invasion; and the whole Austrian army had suffered defeat. The slaughter of these battles, in which all the best-trained troops of the warring nations had been desperately engaged, had exceeded anything which history records of the past and was destined to surpass any other month even of the Great War itself. The antagonists, gasping and streaming with blood, but still possessed of unmeasured resources, their full wrath unloosed, paused for a moment to rearrange their armies and refill their ranks, to replenish their ammunition and shape their plans anew.

  The twin defeats on the Marne and around Lemberg had been decisive in their influence upon the neutrals. Roumania had actually decided at the beginning of September to make proposals to the Central Powers for alliance. During the critical hours of the nth Count Czernin, the Austro-Hungarian Ambassador in Bucharest, had telegraphed to Vienna that Roumania was prepared to take an active part against Russia if the territory of Suczawa were ceded to her in reward. Conrad in his extremity had clutched at this. But under the decisions of the battlefields in France and Galicia the offer was suppressed before it could be accepted. Bulgaria, the spectator of the Austrian repulse by Serbia, wrapped herself in impenetrable reserve. We shall come to Italy later.

  Even as early as August 10th Moltke’s quality had been judged inadequate; and his successor was openly discussed. Now on the 12th of September he was dismissed from the supreme command, and Falkenhayn, who at the outbreak had been War Minister, ruled in his stead at Supreme Headquarters. The dismissal was veiled in secrecy and pretence. No public proclamation was made. Moltke became ill; he dropped out; and gradually it was understood that a change had occurred.

  The new Commander was a soldier of ability and distinction. He was comparatively young. He had passed through all the grades. He had a high degree of personal charm and the broad outlook of military statesmen. Many good judges consider him the ablest soldier that Germany produced during the whole war. He had been a convinced adherent of the Schlieffen Plan in its integrity. He had watched with misgivings and even disapproval the cumulative weakenings of the right-hand wheel which had marked Moltke’s concessions to the pressure of arguments and events. To these he attributed the miscarriage. His first resolve on assuming power was to restore the Schlieffen Plan to its original form, and in spite of all the changed conditions to carry it through with his utmost resources. For this purpose he ordered the greater part of the Sixth and Seventh armies to be transported from the Alsace-Lorraine front to strengthen with overwhelming force the German right; and thither also he proposed to direct the four new army corps of youthful volunteers which had been formed upon a strong professional framework in the first enthusiasm of the war.

  Opportunity, however, had gone. Indeed, but for Joffre’s slowness in making up his mind, the German right flank would itself have been turned at the very outset of Falkenhayn’s command. Maunoury’s army which from September 10 faced east had only to be marched north, to begin an outflanking movement in which all the priorities rested with the French. Nevertheless, as Joffre gradually and tardily perceived the situation, he began to reach out his left hand, and corps after corps, withdrawn from his right wing, was sent to prolong the French line to the northward. Thus in succession the German Corps arriving from Alsace-Lorraine found themselves confronted at each point by the similar movement from south to north which was taking place on the French side. This process quickened every day and developed into a series of would-be out-flanking encounters known to history as ‘The Race to the Sea.’ By the end of September Falkenhayn realized that the day of the Schlieffen Plan was gone for ever.

  His second resolve was the great drive against the Channel ports. Most of his Sixth and Seventh Armies had by now been employed in filling the newly-extended German front from the neighbourhood of Noyon, where its right had rested on September 10, to the neighbourhood of Lille, where it was established by the 20th of the month. There remained however the four new corps from Germany, the IIIrd Reserve Corps and detachments investing Antwerp, together with various other forces gathered from the front or released by the capitulation of Maubeuge. Falkenhayn’s new plan was to secure his right flank by taking Antwerp and settling once for all with the Belgian army, and thereafter to thrust in about La Bassée and strike in the direction of Boulogne. Between these two horns of attack, one driving through Antwerp along the coast, the other converging westward from La Bassée, Falkenhayn hoped to catch the remains of the Belgian army and any French or British troops in the Pas de Calais, and at the same time become master of all the sea-ports from the mouth of the Scheldt to the mouth of the Seine by which British aid could come to France and Belgium.

  However, a succession of unforeseen and untoward events obstructed this design. The British army had begun to withdraw from the Aisne at the wish of the British Government and Sir John French in the first week of October. After some delays through its trains having to traverse laterally the railway communications of the French front, it began to arrive in the neighbourhood of St. Omer. Here it was joined by its cavalry which had marched behind the French lines. This army, now made up to rather more than full strength, advanced from St. Omer and deployed along the very front from La Bassée to Ypres upon which Falkenhayn’s new offensive was about to fall. At the same time the British Cabinet showed itself strongly disposed to aid and stimulate the Belgian defence of Antwerp, whose forts were falling one by one under the enormous howitzers lent by Austria. The Royal Naval Division arrived in the threatened city, and its evacuation by the Belgians was delayed by five days. Lord Kitchener, exerting himself for the salvation of Antwerp, sent the last available British regular division (the 7th) collected from the fortresses of the Empire, together with a cavalry division and a brigade of Fusiliers Marins and a territorial division obtained from the French, all under General Rawlinson, to the neighbourhood of Ghent.

  Both sides were in equal ignorance about each other’s intentions. Lord Kitchener and his colleagues had, of course, no knowledge of the powerful forces which Falkenhayn was about to loose. Falkenhayn and the Supreme Command were perplexed by unexpected contacts around Bruges and between Ghent and Antwerp with British regular cavalry and the advance troops of well-known British regiments. The British army was missing from the Aisne and French troops had replaced them in their old positions. There seemed more than a possibility of a strong British thrust being delivered from the sea coast against the right flank of the intended German advance. It was judged necessary, therefore, to delay the march of the four new German Army Corps which were now detraining in Belgium until the coast from Antwerp and Ostend had been cleared of the Belgian army and its British allies of uncertain and unmeasured strength. It was not until October 9, the day the Germans entered Antwerp, that the general advance southward began, and not until October 11 that the German troops opposite La Bassée and Armentières came into collision with the advance guards of the British IInd Corps under Smith-Dorrien. Close, fierce fighting immediately began and neither side could make any progress. The British IIIrd Corps, under Pulteney, which came into the line near Armentières, was equally held. The downward advance of the four new army corps towards Ypres and Dunkirk would have turned the left of the British battle now raging from La Bassée and Armentières. But Sir John French, with soldierly daring, sent his Ist Army Corps under Haig to Ypres to meet these enemies of unknown strength, and trusted to fortune, to the cavalry, and to the arrival of further de
tachments to skin over the wide gap between his two main bodies. At Ypres Haig found Rawlinson with the 7th Division and his cavalry, and a new collision with the German masses of a most bloody and desperate character occurred. Farther to the north again King Albert and his army, aided by the heroic Fusiliers Marins of Admiral Ronarc’h, and by the monitors and other bombarding vessels with several flotillas from the British navy, turned to bay along the line of the Yser. Along this whole front from La Bassée to the sea an intensifying battle now flared. The Belgians under British impulsion opened the sluices, and the sea poured over the flat ground, causing large inundations and bringing the advance of the German right (IIIrd Reserve Corps) to an absolute standstill.

  No progress could be made therefore by either horn of the German attack. Falkenhayn then reduced the scope of his plan and from the 20th October onwards aimed only at a break through in the centre at Ypres and Armentières. He encountered an unyielding resistance. By October 30 he was forced to restrict his ambitions to the mere capture of Ypres. Upon this task his new army corps were launched in all their youthful ardour. Supported by bombardments of their heavy artillery the flower of German youth and patriotism advanced in seemingly overwhelming numbers, often in close order, hand in hand, singing their national songs. They were met by what had now become little more than a picket line of long-service British regulars skilled in the use of the rifle and with a very few machine-guns, crouching in deep disconnected holes which they were unable or unwilling to quit. Appalling slaughter was inflicted upon the German masses. Attacks renewed again and again with patriotic devotion withered before the well-directed rifle fire. But Falkenhayn and the Kaiser, who had now come to regard Ypres as a trophy indispensable to the prestige of the German army, persisted obstinately, and not till after the middle of November did they finally accept the fact that the fronts in the west were stabilized from Switzerland to the North Sea.