No more elaborate organization would up to this point have produced better results. But a change had now come over the war. Its scale and complications grew ceaselessly; and we now had broadening surpluses of men and ships to employ. Here was the question which demanded scientific study.
Once we felt supreme and safe at sea, we looked almost instinctively to Turkey, Russia and the Balkans. During the whole of December Colonel Hankey, Mr. Lloyd George and I, working at first independently, became increasingly interested in the South-East of Europe. After war had been declared, diplomacy counted little with neutrals. They were no longer concerned with what was said or promised. The questions they asked themselves were, What was going to happen, and who was going to win? They were not prepared to accept British assurances upon either point. We were astonished to find that many of these neutrals seemed to doubt that Great Britain would certainly be victorious. One pitied their obliquity. But they persisted in it. The Foreign Office talked well; but it was like talking to the void.
However, by the first week in December, we three all separately reached the conclusions that the Western Front had frozen into a deadlock, that whoever attacked would get the worst of it, and that a great diversion or turning movement, diplomatic, naval and military, should be made through and upon the Mediterranean Powers. Little did we know how closely our thoughts corresponded to the pre-occupations of Berlin or to the conclusions of HL. Behind the hostile fronts all was mystery. Behind the allied fronts, concerted action or machinery for such action was as yet in its infancy. On December 29 I wrote to the Prime Minister as follows:
‘I think it quite possible that neither side will have the strength to penetrate the other’s lines in the Western theatre. Belgium particularly, which it is vital for Germany to hold as a peace-counter, has no doubt been made into a mere succession of fortified lines. I think it probable that the Germans hold back several large mobile reserves of their best troops. Without attempting to take a final view, my impression is that the position of both armies is not likely to undergo any decisive change.’
On January 1 the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Lloyd George, circulated to the War Committee a paper drawing attention to the unfounded optimism which prevailed about the war, to the increasing failure of Russia as a prime factor, and to the need for action in the Balkan Peninsula, in order to rally Greece and Bulgaria to the cause of the Allies. On the same day Colonel Hankey circulated a masterly paper pointing to the Near East as the decisive theatre for our immediate allied action. These documents had been shown to me some days earlier, and on December 31 I wrote to the Prime Minister, Mr. Asquith, about them saying, ‘We are substantially in agreement and our conclusions are not incompatible…. I wanted Gallipoli attacked on the Turkish declaration of war…. Meanwhile the difficulties have increased….’ On January 3, after continuous daily discussions at the Admiralty and with the Prime Minister, Lord Fisher wrote me a letter, already printed in the second volume of the World Crisis, in which he declared, ‘I consider the attack on Turkey holds the field—but only if it’s immediate!’
There is no doubt that had we known, as we know now, the nature of the discussions proceeding in Berlin, some plan of this kind could and would have been converted into coherent action. We had among ourselves divined the secret of success. Could we have obtained one commanding decision on the fundamental issue, and had there been a proper staff-machine to translate it into plans, it is certain that we could have intervened in the Eastern Mediterranean long before the Germans could have brought their forces to bear.
Sir Edward Grey argues in his book that the Germans were on interior lines and could thus frustrate all diversions. But this was not true of Turkey in this period of the war. On the contrary its untruth was the key to all the German perturbation. They could not aid Turkey for many months. Amphibious power could strike Turkey in a few weeks.
Our war-direction was not however upon that level. We have seen what struggles were called for from HL,—supported though they were by Conrad, by the whole influence of Austria and by the German Chancellor—to procure the transference of the war effort to the East, and only with what compromises they had succeeded. For all the power of the Admiralty we could only use arguments. We could not display the laurels of a naval Tannenberg. There was no supreme authority in London as in Berlin, to say Aye or No, right or left, west or east. It was only one man’s opinion against another’s. Still, from this moment the politicians on the War Council looked mainly to the East; while Sir John French and the British Army Headquarters fought desperately and naturally to have every man, gun and shell in France. Lord Kitchener with ever-changing mind was the battle-ground of these contentions. Sometimes one side prevailed with him and then again the other. There can be no doubt that if the ‘Easterners’ had only had to deal with the British army and its Headquarters staff, we could have given them orders. But behind Sir John French and Sir Henry Wilson towered the mighty authority of General Joffre, victor of the Marne.
Joffre, like Falkenhayn, looked only to the Western Front, and like Falkenhayn believed in the superiority of the attack. There alone, in his judgment as in that of his opponent, lay in 1915 the decision of the war. Each was sure that he had only to gather a few more army corps and a few more cannon to break the opposing line and march triumphantly, as the case might be, to Paris or the Rhine. They were of course, as we now know, absolutely out of touch with the true facts and values. Neither of them, nor their expert advisers, had ever sufficiently realized the blunt truth—quite obvious to common soldiers—that bullets kill men. Against such an incubus we could make no headway. Every time Lord Kitchener was persuaded to the East—where indeed his instincts led him—and measures were taken in that direction, Joffre (with the French government working collaterally through the Foreign Office) descended upon him, so that he swung to and fro like a buoy in a tide-stream. Lots of people would no doubt have done the same. It must also be remembered that the British Empire was only at this time a subsidiary factor in the land war. France had ceded to us the decisive control of naval affairs, and some declared that it was our duty after expressing our views to conform to the military guidance of the chiefs of the great and heroic army at whose side our forces—only as yet a tenth as strong—were contending. As Lord Kitchener observed after one heart-shaking discussion: ‘We cannot make war as we ought; we can only make it as we can.’
CHAPTER XVIII
THE WINTER BATTLE
Hindenburg had gained his way over Falkenhayn. He had now to make good against the Russians. No doubt in the course of the controversy which the last chapter has described both he and Ludendorff had been led to paint the successes which would reward their plans in glowing colours. All the German and Austrian armies on the Eastern Front were to join in an immense double offensive in East Prussia and far off in the Carpathians against the Grand Duke’s northern and southern flanks. The Russian armies were to be seized, as it were, by a crab of monstrous size and gripped simultaneously with each of its two widely-spread claws. Falkenhayn had acidly pointed out that the two flanking attacks separated by 600 kilometres could not be brought into any effective relation. HL were under no delusions. The operations on which they had set their hearts lay in the north. Reinforced by the four corps wrested from the Supreme Command, they now controlled three Armies: their original Eighth, the Ninth with which they had made their two unsuccessful thrusts at Warsaw, and the three new corps now uniting as a Tenth Army under the command of General von Eichhorn. Their Eighth and Ninth Armies stood at the end of January along lines drawn after the battle of Lodz had ended in mid-December. The front of the Ninth Army running north and south faced Warsaw at about 40 miles’ distance. The Eighth Army crouched behind the course of the Angerapp stream and the now frozen lakes. The interval of nearly 200 kilometres between them was filled by Landwehr and Landsturm troops, including Zastrow’s corps, gathered at a second gleaning from the various German fortresses. HL now proposed to use all these forces
in combination.
From what they had learned through the Russian wireless and other sources they credited the Grand Duke with ‘a gigantic plan’ of his own. They believed that as soon as the winter relented he would strike at East Prussia by an upward drive towards Thorn and simultaneously in the north from the direction of Kovno. They intended to forestall him. The Russian armies were in no lack of men. Limitless supplies of obedient peasants were training behind the Czar’s frontiers, and as soon as uniforms, equipment and ammunition could be provided, refilled the shattered formations or added to their numbers. It was not men that Russia lacked; they were in fact the only resources she possessed in superfluity. Her armies filled their immense front, and on paper presented totals larger than ever before. But trained officers and educated non-commissioned officers and clerks of every kind were far below the proportions required to handle such masses of soldiery. Moreover, not only cannon of every calibre and ammunition of every kind, but even rifles were hideously deficient. Although the Grand Duke, Ruzski and Ivanov still nourished offensive schemes, they were painfully conscious that the aggressive power of Russia had gravely declined since the early battles of the war. Ivanov, who already held the passes of the Carpathians, pressed the Stavka in long personal interviews to reinforce him for an invasion of the plains of Hungary. Ruzski, to whose opinion the Grand Duke leaned, preferred to renew the advance through Poland westward and north-westward towards the German frontier. All these discussions were abruptly terminated by German action.
According to the plan of HL, the left claw of what I have called the ‘Crab’ was to reach suddenly forward through the Angerapp-Lötzen-Lakes line to seize and destroy all the Russians within its grasp. For this purpose the Ninth Army would move a part of its forces, mostly from the XXth Corps, northwards from the level of Warsaw to the neighbourhood of Ortelsburg and the fields where Tannenberg had been gained, while the three corps forming the new Tenth Army would range themselves in the north in front of Insterburg. On the prescribed date the right of the Eighth Army would strike through Johannisburg towards Lyck, while the Tenth Army would march first north-east, towards Tilsit, then turning continually southwards, through Gumbinnen and Stallupönen towards Grodno. Both these movements as they developed would expose their outer flanks to Russian attacks, in the north from Kovno and the line of the Niemen, and in the south from the line of the Bobr, a tributary of the Narev. Not much danger was apprehended for the strong Tenth Army, but the German forces advancing south of the Lakes would be liable to heavy attacks on their right and right rear, and it was to protect them from this that the Ninth Army troops had been brought to the scene.
To mask the northward movement of these Ninth Army troops a sensational attack was made by the rest of the Ninth Army at Bolimov on January 31. A feature of this battle, intended to be much talked-of, was the first employment of 18,000 poison-gas shells. The greatest interest was taken in this improvident disclosure of a terrible secret. Hoffmann betook himself to the church steeple of Bolimov in order to witness the wholesale stifling of the Russians which the chemists had claimed would follow. He described the results as disappointing. The number of shells then thought magnificent was petty compared to later periods, and the intense cold robbed the poison gases of their expected diffusive power. Still on January 31 what the Kaiser afterwards decided to call ‘the Winter battle in Masuria’ was in fact begun by this fierce demonstration towards Warsaw.
It served its strategic purpose well. The Russian attention was violently drawn to this point, and they remained unconscious of the northward movement of troops from the Ninth Army. Even more remarkable is it that no inkling came to the Stavka of the deployment and assembly in East Prussia of the four new army corps. They were all in their positions, three to the north and one to the south of the Lake line, in the early days of February, without any warning having reached their prey. Indeed the idea that any great operations could begin in such fearful wintry weather was scouted by the Russians’ experience of their own climate. During February 5 and 6 tremendous snowstorms and blizzards lashed East Prussia. The cold was intense and the snow ‘metre-deep,’ or whirled into frozen drifts and hummocks. Even the stubborn wills of HL hesitated before launching their hardy troops into the storm. But they steeled their hearts.
The immediate object of their design was the Tenth Russian Army, which sat in its trenches from Goldap to Johannisburg in front of the Angerapp-Lake line. They and their commander, General Sievers, suspected nothing of what was passing behind the shield of German fortifications. They passed the 6th and 7th in shovelling the snow out of their trenches. The right pincer of the German crab-claw began to move on the 7th. General Litzmann with the XLth Reserve Corps and the 2nd Division struck from Johannisburg towards Lyck. On the 8th the left pincer, the whole of the German Tenth Army, attacked between the Gumbinnen-Königsberg railway and the Memel river.
The three corps of this army (XXIst, XXXIXth Reserve and XXXVIIIth Reserve from north to south) drove the Russian covering troops before them and began immediately to turn the right and menace the Russian retreat. The enormous difficulties of the weather did not prevent the steady progress of the German Army. It continued to extend its enveloping movement around the Russian right, wheeling continually to the southward. On the night of the 9th–10th the XXIst Corps, after an uninterrupted march of 29 hours, had reached Schirwindt and Vladislavov. The centre corps had passed Pilkallen and the army front faced almost south at right-angles to the original Russian position. On the 10th the XXIst Corps reached Vilkoviski, cutting the railway to Kovno, and the XXIXth Reserve Corps in the centre reached Wirballen, where an entire Russian division which was in reserve was surprised and destroyed with a loss of 10,000 prisoners and 6 guns. Thus the line of retreat of the whole of the Russian right upon Kovno was severed. Vigorous attacks by Russian dismounted cavalry from Kovno upon the left and rear of the XXIst Corps were beaten off, but the threat from Kovno was considered sufficient to require the movement of a Landwehr division from the German right to ward off such interference. On the 12th the German Tenth Army front ran from Mariampol and Kalvaria to the neighbourhood of Goldap, and the Russian centre began to be seriously threatened. Indeed there were now left but two lines of retreat for the whole of General Sievers’ army: the first towards the Niemen through Olita and the second through the Forest of Augustow.
Meanwhile in the south the XLth Reserve Corps was moving on Lyck to cut the Augustow road. Here they encountered tenacious Russian resistance. The road and railway junctions of Lyck were now vital. Bitter fighting with repeated Russian counter-attacks continued in this area in the most severe weather during the whole of the 12th. Valiantly the Russians continued to defend themselves. The German southern force, unable to make progress frontally, extended its right towards Grajevo. Meanwhile the whole front of the Eighth Army had broken out from behind the Angerapp position, and now fell upon the Russians in front of them. By the evening of the 13th they were close to Marggrabova—Sievers’ old headquarters—and Suvalki. On this day the defenders of Lyck, with both their flanks turned and their rear menaced, withdrew in good order from the positions they had so bravely held. The Germans entered Lyck on the 14th, capturing 5,000 prisoners in the town. The Kaiser, closely following up the advance, visited the town that day and congratulated his victorious troops.
The pincers were closing fast upon the Russian Tenth Army. From the moment when these two great movements upon his flanks were revealed, General Sievers thought only of retreat. Burning villages behind them, but leaving nevertheless vast quantities of stores and provisions, over 350,000 Russians marched eastward as fast as possible. The roads became choked with transport in inextricable confusion. Infantry floundered through the snowdrifts. The wheeling advance of the German Tenth Army drove all these masses of men remorselessly southward. Large numbers of Russians broke and tore their way here and there through the encircling grip to the east and north-east. Masses of prisoners were taken; and always the main
body of the Russian army was driven towards Augustow Forest. Everywhere the Russian rear-guards fought with the greatest stubbornness to secure the escape of their comrades; and as the Germans could only drag their artillery forward by using as many as eighteen horses to a single gun, their infantry were often stopped. The Russian counter-attacks from Kovno to prevent the imminent encirclement of General Sievers continued vigorously in the north. On the 13th in the south other strong efforts were made by Russian forces debouching from the small fortress of Osovets towards Lyck. These again were warded off by the Germans after hard fighting.
The frost had now broken and a sudden thaw converted the roads into quagmires of mud. By the night of the 15th the Russian IIIrd and XXVIth Corps had passed Augustow or traversed the forest with heavy losses and lay in great disorder, but outside the claw—around Grodno. But the Russian XXth Corps, with large numbers of stragglers and masses of transport and artillery, were still in the forest. Their rear-guards held its western edge with determination. And now Eichhorn, his right and centre arrested, resolved to repeat the audacious manœuvre which General von François had used at Tannenberg. He ordered his left corps (XXIst) to move southward round the northern side of the forest regardless of the peril which would threaten them in the rear from the fortress of Grodno. During the 15th, 16th and 17th this thin line of Germans, resolutely intent upon the encirclement of whatever Russians might be in their clutches, pressed continually forward, defending themselves both from the troops breaking out of the trap and from the Russian counter-attacks from Grodno. On the 18th the forest was completely encircled.
Thus hopelessly trapped the Russian XXth Corps fought on with supreme devotion. For four days and nights they hurled themselves in vain against the thin invincible lines. On the 21st the crab-claw closed and seized its prey. 30,000 men, with 11 generals and 200 guns, laid down their arms, and many thousand German prisoners taken in the earlier fighting were also rescued by their countrymen.
The World Crisis Page 27
