The Eastern Front 1914-1917

by Norman Stone

  Both Moltke in Berlin and Conrad in Vienna felt that 1914 was the last chance. After that, the Central Powers, losing allies, structurally unable to exploit their own peoples, and indeed, in the Austro-Hungarian case, unable to count even on basic loyalty, would have no hope of winning the war that, with every political crisis in Europe, seemed to come nearer. The generals pressed for war, in Moltke’s case from March onwards. The statesmen’s attitude was more complicated, since Bethmann Hollweg hoped to find some device for bringing about British neutrality, and since other German statesmen had hopes of invoking the conservative cause of alliance with Russia. But the statesmen, too, increasingly sympathised with the generals’ statements. An accident, the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Serb terrorists, acted as catalyst, at the end of June 1914. The Central Powers would provoke a quarrel with Russia, by threatening her client, Serbia, with political extinction, ostensibly as a punishment for Serbian government complicity in the assassination of the Archduke. Bethmann Hollweg explained on 8th July that if Russia went to war to protect Serbia, better then than later; if she did not go to war, it would be because the French had let her down, so that she would come round once more to the German side. He explained to Lichnowsky, ambassador in London, that ‘not only the extremists, but even level-headed politicians are worried at the increases in Russian strength, and the imminence of Russian attack’, and Jagow, for the Foreign Office, echoed this with the remark that if war had to come, then in view of Russia’s attitude, it would be better then than later.9

  An ultimatum was served on Serbia, and was duly refused on 25th July. The Austrians declared war on her three days later. There was some indecision in Russia. Sazonov, foreign minister, felt that Austria should be threatened, but not Germany; consequently, the army was asked to mobilise only those corps ear-marked for the Austrian front. But, increasingly, most people suspected that Germany was behind Austria; and in any case the soldiers had good technical arguments for rejecting partial mobilisation. It was all or nothing; and by 31st July Russia had decided on general mobilisation. This broke down the last barriers in Germany, where Bethmann Hollweg had begun to have second thoughts. The Schlieffen Plan demanded that there should be at least three clear weeks when the German army, untroubled by Russian invasion, could defeat France. As soon as the first Russian reservist pulled on his boots, the alarm bells would ring in Germany, for by 1914 the timetable of the Schlieffen Plan had already become uncomfortably tight, and loss even of a day’s preparation might be disastrous for Germany. Accordingly, the Germans mobilised as well; declared war on Russia when she failed to demobilise; and began to effect the Schlieffen Plan with a fabricated declaration of war on France. The railway, chief production of nineteenth-century civilisation, had proved to be chief agent in its destruction.10

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Opening Round: East Prussia

  Panic and desperation had prompted the German generals’ behaviour in July. But their mood came from factors that the First World War showed to be unreal. Schlieffen had suffered from visions of a two-pronged invasion of Germany, from France and Russia, and his famous Plan seemed to be the only possible way of countering this threat. But the war showed, first, that armies’ mobility on the offensive was so limited as to reduce much of the danger, and second that defensive fire-power was so powerful that even a superiority of three to one did not suffice to overcome it. There was, in other words, every chance for a defensive operation. After September 1914, this became clear to all sides, though it came as a great surprise.

  However, in August, the first month of the war, things went much as men had imagined they would before the war. There were great offensives: the Schlieffen Plan set the bulk of Moltke’s army marching through Belgium into the French flank; Plan XVII set most of Joffre’s army attacking German positions in Alsace and Lorraine; Plan No. 19 set two Russian armies against East Prussia, and four others against Austrian Galicia; the Austro-Hungarian army also attacked both Serbia and Russia. On all of the fronts, there were great strategic manoeuvres, bringing the Germans far into France, the Russians far into Austria; in East Prussia, there was a great encounter between the German VIII Army and the two Russian armies, in which troops marched and countermarched much as men had expected them to, until one of the Russian armies was resoundingly defeated in the battle of Tannenberg (25th–30th August), and the other expelled from East Prussia in the battle of the Masurian Lakes (7th–14th September). It was only after the first month that the real character of the war became apparent. Troops, particularly in the west, came to appreciate the possibilities open to defensive action, and offensive manoeuvre did not really return to the western battlefields until 1918.

  August 1914 was thus an anomalous month. It reflected, not wartime realities, but pre-war illusions. Commanders on both sides deliberately neglected the possibilities of the defensive, both strategic and tactical. Instead of waiting to be attacked, they themselves attacked, and thus allowed their men to be decimated before they had a chance to prove their worth in defensive action. The doctrine of out-and-out offensive dictated their conduct. This was, in part, because military historians and General Staff theorists alleged that the offensive ‘corresponds to the national character’. More prosaically, it reflected disbelief in the men. Commanders felt in their hearts that it took ten years to make a real soldier. Since the turn of the century, they had been allowed to take conscripts only for three active years, and even then a large number of conscripts had had to be released after two years, because the army could not afford their upkeep. Moreover, the number of conscripts had risen to such a point that there was only one officer for thirty men, one N.C.O. for ten men; and both officers and N.C.O.s were sometimes of uncertain quality. Army leaders concluded that the men could be taught nothing complicated. Tactical training was therefore limited; complicated manoeuvres were ruled out. The Russian General Staff Academy taught only two manoeuvres after 1912—forward and back—and the men’s tactical formations were also constructed on an understanding that nothing fancy should be attempted, or the men would end up as a panic-stricken mob milling around the field. The men were simply gathered in thick masses, and set to charge the enemy line, regardless of their vulnerability to artillery. Similarly, the bulk of each army’s artillery was laid in following assumptions of high-speed, open-country, mass-warfare, and therefore became almost obsolete when trench-warfare began. August 1914 took its own peculiar course, unlike any other month of the Great War, because all of the European armies tacitly agreed to treat it as a museum-piece of nineteenth-century warfare rather than an expression of the new possibilities open to twentieth-century soldiers. The men paid heavily for this. Deaths were greater in that month than at any later time—in the Austro-Hungarian army, they made up 15 per cent of casualties in 1914, as against 7.5 per cent in 1916.1

  Franco-Russian General Staff agreements had been built on an assumption that the out come of the war would be decided within six weeks. The French expected German attack, and were also virtually certain that it would infringe Belgian neutrality. Between sixteen and twenty-five German divisions were (with exaggeration) expected in the east. Russia must therefore mobilise fast, and attack the Germans’ eastern forces, in order to divert some of the western ones from the French. There had always been rather empty undertakings to the effect that 800,000 Russians would take the field against Germany three weeks after mobilisation was

  The line-up for war, 191

  announced. By 1914, these undertakings acquired substance, and the Russian invasion of Germany was to begin on 15th August. Two armies were set to invade East Prussia—I, under Rennenkampf, from the east, II, under Samsonov, from the south. Later on, it was alleged that these armies’ early crossing of the border was evidence of self-sacrificial gallantry on the Russian side. In reality, it showed only common sense. Ignatiev, Russian military attaché in Paris, reported that French losses were very high—in some regiments, fifty per cent—and added ‘it becomes clear th
at the outcome of the war will depend on what we can do to deflect German troops against us’. The French had themselves launched an early offensive; and Yanushkevitch, chief of staff of the field army, told his troops to begin their offensive ‘by virtue of the same inter-allied obligations’, on 1 5th August.2

  It was also said, after the event, that the Russian I and II armies had sacrificed themselves in France’s cause, rushing to begin their invasion of Germany before they were ready, and suffering from shell-shortage, confused supply, missing units. This was a confusion of thought. Mobilisation went smoothly enough, according to Dobrorolski, who was in charge of it (and who was decorated for his work). In the first place, two-fifths of the whole army was already concentrated in the west in peacetime; the anticipatory measures of the ‘preparatory period’ were useful; and only two-fifths of the 5,000,000 men serving in the army when mobilisation came were due for front-line service, hardly more than the peacetime army. Russian mobilisation thus needed only 4,000 transports, as against the 7,000 of German mobilisation. There were 744 battalions of infantry and 621 squadrons of cavalry to be moved, and by the 20th day of mobilisation, 544 and 361 had reached their de-training points, by the 27th day, 644 and 453. By the 18th day, 63 infantry divisions were ready for action, by the 29th, 73½ of the 98 ultimately designed for this theatre. The two armies due to invade East Prussia were in fact ready before any of the others. Zhilinski, who commanded the north-western front, told Yanushkevitch on 10th August that I Army would be completely ready for action by the 12th day of mobilisation (11th August) and II Army even earlier, except for one of its corps, 6th, which had to arrive on foot from Bialystok. By the 12th day, the two armies would have 208 battalions and 228 squadrons ready for action (against less than 100 battalions in the German VIII Army).3

  The real difficulty was not that the armies were not ‘ready’; it was that they were ready as Zhilinski understood it—that is, gloriously unprepared for what was to come. It is characteristic that one writer (Savant) should say that I Army had ‘only’ 420 rounds per gun when it took the field.4 At the time, the artillerists regarded such a quantity as evidence of unparalleled generosity on their part. After a year of fighting in the Russo-Japanese War, each gun in the I Manchurian Army had used just over 1,000 rounds, while each gun in the other two Manchurian Armies had used respectively 708 and 944. No-one imagined that I Army in East Prussia could possibly use more than a few hundred rounds per gun in the course of a few days’ action, and would have cashiered any gunner who suggested anything different. As it was, the experts arranged for shell to be supplied with what they themselves saw as crazy prodigality. On the 12th day of mobilisation, I Army’s guns had 785 rounds apiece, II Army’s, 737.5 The staff of the Warsaw military district reckoned that, by the 10th day of mobilisation, II Army would have enough shell for a long engagement. Similar smugness was expressed, with equal inappropriateness, in other matters. The staff of II Army arranged for 10,415 hospital-beds to be prepared, assuming a ten-day occupation by patients.6 This, too, was thought to be munificent. In practice, just as shell was fired off at rates no-one had thought possible, so casualties were vast, from the outset, and II Army’s hospital-places barely sufficed for the cases of syphilis. But all of this unreadiness was discovered subsequent to defeat. At the time, judging from a collection of documents assembled by editors sympathetic to tales of unreadiness, there was only one complaint: the Kexholm Guard Regiment, made up of Latvians with small feet, complained that Russian-issue boots were too big.7 ‘Unreadiness’, like ‘Russia sacrificing herself to save France’, was at bottom a hard-luck story.

  A lot more than ‘unreadiness’ was wrong with the army’s behaviour in this period of the war. In the first place, there was a wholly mistaken reliance on cavalry. Promises to invade Germany by the 15th day of mobilisation, and German fears of such an invasion, were really concerned with cavalry—a wave of Huns would sweep into deutsches Kulturland. I and II Armies had nine cavalry divisions between them, and each infantry division also had its cavalry units. A great deal was sacrificed to make these cavalry units effective. Mobilisation would probably have gone faster if there had been less cavalry to shift. A disproportionate amount of rolling-stock went into its transporting and supplying; about the same number of trains (forty) for a cavalry division with 4,000 men and twelve guns as for an infantry division with 16,000 and fifty-four. Maintenance of these divisions was also a great burden for already strained railway-systems. A horse needed twelve pounds of grain every day, even for a few hours’ work, and transporting of grain was usually the largest item in railway-supply—the British, for instance, using more tonnage to ship horses and fodder to the western front than was sunk by German submarines. Cavalry retarded armies’ mobility, as much as it promoted mobility.

  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.8

  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.9 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 fo
ur 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.