The Eastern Front 1914-1917

by Norman Stone

  The realities of 1914 caught up with Ludendorff almost at once, when he turned against the Russian I Army. On 31st August the remnant of II Army had retired over the border. This left I Army extended between Königsberg and the Angerapp line, its left wing isolated in a region of lakes and forest in the south-eastern corner of the province. Rennenkampf had now called in further troops, making some twelve divisions; and the new X Army was to be assembled in the south-eastern corner of East Prussia to make the flank safer. Ludendorff had also received reinforcements—in the last days of Prittwitz’s command, the panic he divulged had led to his being sent two first-line army corps from the western front (11. and Guard Reserve) with a cavalry division—a withdrawal of troops from France that did something to halt the German invasion and thus justified the Russian offensive of August. Now, VIII Army contained eighteen and a half infantry divisions and two cavalry divisions, most of which Ludendorff was prepared to concentrate against the Russian I Army.

  He hoped for another Tannenberg—a strong group (again under François) would move against the isolated Russian left; it would then move into the rear of the centre groups, and Ludendorff hoped for mass-surrenders, as before. He performed a commendable effort of concentration—of the 232 battalions and 1,212 guns in East Prussia, 184 and 1,074 were used for this operation: the rest were strung out along the southern borders against the chance of a Russian attack there. The Russian I Army had 228 battalions and 924 guns, but scattered along the front, and much of it concentrated on the northern side—on the left there was a second-line division, some cavalry, a few battalions of the new X Army, supported to the north by three second-line divisions weak in artillery. Once more, the Germans were led into a tactical success by Russian blundering. Some Russians did foresee Ludendorff’s action against I Army’s left—Oranovski, chief of staff to Zhilinski, asked Rennenkampf how he would face this extremely probable enveloping manoeuvre’.31 But Zhilinski was worried that a retreat by Rennenkampf would allow the Germans to pursue II Army—which had been told to go back as far as Warsaw, even to destroy the bridges there.32 In any case, the new X Army would do something for the open flank. Meanwhile, Rennenkampf made free an army corps and sent it marching south; he also pulled back his forward troops a few miles. Quite mysteriously, he and other commanders seem to have expected that there would be a German attack from Königsberg—an illusion that Ludendorff, through false messages, fostered. There were worries, but they fell through the complicated structure of Russian command; and no-one foresaw that Ludendorff would act with speed.

  In practice, the German VIII Army was re-assembled after Tannenberg with much efficiency,33 and an attacking group of three divisions was drawn up against the Russian left. The other corps were placed on lines to the north. François led off on 7th September—with sixteen battalions and thirty guns against him, he attacked with forty and two hundred. The weak, second-line troops against him scattered; they appealed to elements of the newly-arriving X Army, a few battalions near the rail-heads. But Brinken, the local corps commander, did not want to split his force, and his army commander—Pflug—was anxious not to have his new force scattered before it even arrived. Both men failed to respond, and François’s group, by 9th September, moved north to cut off some of the Russian troops before Lötzen—taking sixty guns from them.

  But this tactical success ended German victories, and the engagement—the battle of the Masurian Lakes—formed an accurate model of operations to come in the east. Ludendorff urged on François, and set his other corps to attack. But François’s cavalry turned out to be almost as ineffective as Russian cavalry had been before: it could be held up even by retreating troops. The frontal attacks of German corps to the north were, almost uniformly, a failure—although, again true to pattern, they often began with minor tactical successes that egged commanders into trying again and again to break through the Russian lines. Moreover, with his left wing turned, Rennenkampf did not make the mistake into which Samsonov had been led: he gave orders for retreat in time. His front had been transformed into a semi-circle, and he could bring troops more rapidly from the north than the Germans, who had to go round the semi-circle, were able to do; and the retreat, in general, was skilfully managed. By 13th September, the Russian I Army had once more crossed the border, to safety. Ludendorff grumbled—François should have made a greater effort. But François could have done little more: he suffered from supply-problems, fatigue, increasing Russian resistance as reserves came in, all problems that tactically successful troops often encountered. These problems came up still more after 13th September, as the Germans moved into Russian territory. By 20th September they were meeting serious tactical reverses; by 25th September, the two Russian armies organised a counter-offensive that drove back the Germans to their frontier, in the end even as far as the Angerapp lines. VIII Army had captured 30,000 prisoners—almost all of them as a result of François’s initial tactical success on 7th and 8th September. But it had also lost heavily—100,000 men, of 250,000—and the battle of the Masurian lakes ended with a complicated stalemate. Unnoticed at the time, this formed the pattern of battles in the east for the following year of war.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Opening Round: Galicia

  The German VIII Army in East Prussia had won, at least partly because sense had been imposed on it. The army was small enough to be controlled. The invasion-routes, the lines of retreat, and the possible areas of riposte had been clearly marked-out; there was a railway-system that allowed transport at least of François’s corps; and in any case there were seven other armies in the west to pick up the pieces if things went wrong. The Austro-Hungarian army in Galicia did not have these advantages. The theatre of operations was the sprawling, flat land of southern Poland, with neither railway-lines nor roads prominent—hundreds of featureless miles, dominated either by dust or by mud. Neither Russians nor Austrians had their plans made for them.

  On the Austrian side, men felt—characteristically—that something must be done, but they did not perceive quite what might be done. They knew that Austria-Hungary must do something to take the load from Germany’s shoulders when war broke out. The Austro-Hungarian General Staff agreed that, in the event of two-front war, Germany’s most sensible course would be to concentrate against France in the first round; consequently, Austria-Hungary would have to undertake a large part of the work in the east, until German troops could come from France. There were plans for an offensive against Russia, in which the German VIII Army might co-operate. Two factors spoke for this offensive: first, the exposed nature of the Russian position in Poland, which jutted out between the two Central Powers, and where large numbers of Russian troops might be surrounded, and second, the calculation that Russian mobilisation would be slow, slow enough, in the first period, to offset any numerical inferiority of the Central Powers in the longer term. Formally, the Austro-Hungarian plan before 1914 was therefore for a full-scale offensive against Russia; formally, too, there was an undertaking on the Germans’ part that VIII Army would, if possible, contribute a parallel offensive from East Prussia. The Austro-Hungarian chief of staff, Conrad von Hötzendorf, dreamt of expelling the Russians from Poland, and was confident enough, when war broke out, to appoint an Austro-Hungarian governor of Warsaw.

  But in Vienna there was always a large gap—perhaps larger than anywhere else—between ideals and reality. The Austro-Hungary army was not strong enough for the rôle cast for it by Conrad. It had steadily declined in relative weight. In the 1880s, Austro-Hungarian planners had supposed that their thirty-two infantry divisions would have to encounter twenty-nine Russian ones. The proportions then changed, and by 1914 the Austro-Hungarians could foresee that about fifty Russian divisions would be mustered against their own forty. The Habsburg Monarchy could not stand the strain of an arms-race; more and more, it became a system of institutionalised escapism, and the chief benefit that it conferred on its subjects was to exempt them from reality.1 Universal military liability wa
s never seriously asserted: the Hungarians would not give money for it, the military authorities themselves shrank from its conse quences, and the people very often expressed their view of it by the simplest method—running away, as Hitler did. Formally, universal conscription was introduced in1868, but money and will were so far lacking that only about one in five of the liable young men ever reached the colours, the rest being exempted under one heading or other, even sometimes by lot-drawing. Even that fifth frequently did not have to serve the full three years prescribed by law, for many were ‘sent on permanent leave’ after two years. The army became so limited in size that many units were amalgamated—resulting in the curious, though not unique, twist that the Austro-Hungarian field army of 1914 contained fewer infantry battalions than the army that had been defeated in 1866, despite a population-increase, since then, of nearly twenty millions.2 After 1906, there were attempts at reform. But they simply broke into the never-never world of Habsburg politics: Hungarian obstruction, threats of abdication, followed more prosaically by jugglings of half-percentages and promises of petty payments to nationalist blackmailers, until a few coppers rattled through the machine to reward the soldiers for trying. As war approached, the Austro-Hungarian army was less and less capable of sustaining it.

  The chief problem was that Austria-Hungary, too, would have to face a two-front war, with means even less adequate than Germany’s.3 Her forty-eight infantry divisions must take on not only the fifty that Russia could send against them, but also the eleven infantry divisions of the Serbian army. The Serbian problem was difficult to deal with. If Austria-Hungary tried to defeat Serbia in the first period of the war, she would have to assemble some twenty divisions, to be occupied no doubt for a month. This would leave less than thirty for the Russian front—not enough to take advantage even of the very first period of the war, when Russian mobilisation had not yet told to its full extent. It might be better to leave a minimal defensive force against Serbia, and concentrate the rest against Russia, and this, formally, was the Austro-Hungarian plan for war: seven divisions against Serbia, the rest for Russia. In the early period of war, these latter would have superiority—enough at any rate to hold the Russians off while Germany defeated the French. Moltke approved of these plans, and promised support from East Prussia.

  These plans took account of everything, except the facts. War was not at all likely to begin with a joint Russo-Serbian declaration of war. On the contrary, it was much more likely that Austria-Hungary would first go to war with Serbia, and that Russia would intervene only later on Serbia’s side. If it came to an Austro-Serbian war, then a substantial part of the Austro-Hungarian army would have to go south—about twenty divisions were foreseen—while the rest of the army was not mobilised. If Russia then came into the war, the rest of the army would indeed be mobilised, but, with less than thirty divisions, it would not suffice for the great offensive that Conrad had promised Moltke. Troops would have to be brought back from Serbia. But two things counted against this: first, the relative poverty of the railway-links between south and north-east, second the inadvisability of suspending a campaign against Serbia in the middle. Before 1914, men did not make up their minds as to how this case—which Conrad none the less described to Moltke as ‘the most difficult, but also the most probable’—might be dealt with. Formally, there was an undertaking that all would be subordinated to the offensive against Russia, but within the General Staff there were serious misgivings. It might look, at the least, peculiar for a Great Power to begin a European war with an extra-tour in the Balkans; but maybe the discrepancy between Austrian means and Austrian pretensions left little choice. Certainly, by the spring of 1914, Conrad was clearly a prey to doubt. Despite his protestations to the Germans, his staff was busied with means by which the forces against Serbia could be strengthened at the expense of those against Russia; and in March, Conrad sketched a deployment-plan for the troops in Galicia that could only mean almost complete abandonment of any schemes for offensive action there. Instead of drawing the troops up in the north-eastern part of Galicia, close to the border with Russia, he suggested unloading them far to the south, on the rivers San and Dniester. This occurred in response to alarms (well-founded) as to the speed of Russian mobilisation and the size of the Russian forces. But characteristically Conrad shrank from formal alteration of the plan, such that the great offensive against Russia was still its main object. Before 1914, the Austro-Hungarian General Staff had thus, in effect, failed to decide which of the two fronts would be treated as more important. This was to happen as circumstances dictated.

  Guaranteeing this flexibility on the ground was difficult, for the railway-technicians had to work out ways by which parts of the army could be treated separately, once mobilisation began. The greater part of the army (‘A-Staffel’) would obviously have to be reserved for the Russian front, whether or no war broke out with Russia, and a lesser part, Minimalgruppe Balkan, would have to be reserved for Serbia, whether for offensive or defensive purposes. The third part of the army (the twelve divisions of ‘B-Staffel’) would be directed against Serbia or Russia as circumstances dictated. If Serbia alone went to war, it would go south; if Russia and Serbia jointly intervened, it would probably go north-east, but even for this case Conrad seems to have wanted flexibility. The railway-planners were told to work out a method by which the mobilisation of these various groups could proceed separately. They found an obvious one: the troops of ‘A-Staffel’ should be sent first to Galicia, those of ‘B-Staffel’ only afterwards, so that people would have a chance to make up their minds what was to be done with them. The result was a serious delay in the mobilisation-programme against Russia. Although good railways stood at the disposal of the troops of ‘B-Staffel’, they would not, even at the best of times, be able to reach Galicia until the period between the 21st and 25th days of mobilisation, whereas the others would be there a week before. Still, this method seemed to make it possible for ‘B-Staffel’ to make an independent movement, if this appeared to be necessary, without disrupting the mobilisation against Russia or Serbia; and the railway-planners were pleased with their performance. ‘B-Staffel’ could either go south against Serbia, or be pulled out of a Serbian campaign, or be sent direct to Galicia, and the necessary flexibility had thus been attained.

  When war began there was a great muddle on the Austro-Hungarian side; and it was not much cleared up by the explanations that were offered, which were, first, that there had been no muddle at all and then that it was the Germans’ fault. On 25th July the Serbians rejected the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum, and Austria-Hungary mobilised half of her army, declaring war on 28th. The seven corps of ‘B-Staffel’ and the Balkan group were to move south; a further one was also mobilised, although it was part of the Galician group, and the railway-planners were told to send it to the Balkans, although Conrad told everyone that it had been mobilised only as protection against Italy, or perhaps revolt in Bohemia. According to Conrad, the bulk of this force was due to be turned against Russia if she intervened. But he could hardly divert troops from the Serbian theatre merely because Russia threatened to intervene; and, according to him, it was not until the very end of the month that Russia’s intention of intervening became clear. Late in the evening of 31st July, accordingly, Conrad tried—by his own account—to turn the bulk of his southern forces against Russia. But he was told by his chief railway-expert, Straub, that this could not be done. So many troop-transports had already left for the Serbian theatre that to turn them about would cause chaos, in the middle of mobilisation against Russia. There was nothing for it but to have these troops (by now, more or less identical with II Army) continue their journey to Serbia. They could de-train there, and be transported back to the north-east, for their Russian campaign, once the lines there had been cleared, i.e. after completion of the mobilisation of the rest of the army against Russia. Conrad had, in other words, lost his chance to send ‘B-Staffel’ direct to Galicia because the Germans had failed to extract ‘c
larity’ about the attitude of Russia before these troops had begun their journey south.

  Conrad goes on to state that, even with this Balkan trip, the troops of II Army arrived hardly a moment later in Galicia than they would have done had they gone there directly; indeed, this was the railway-experts’ reason for allowing the Army to make its peregrinations in the first place. This was, odd as it may appear, true enough. According to the mobilisation-programme, the troops of ‘B-Staffel’ were supposed to follow those of ‘A-Staffel’ to Galicia. These latter were mobilised only in response to Russian mobilisation, on 31st July, and, if the railway-programme were adhered to, they were due to arrive in Galicia between the 15th and 20th days, the ‘B-Staffel’ troops only in the course of the next four or five days. The ‘B-Staffel’ troops would therefore have to wait in any event before going to Galicia, and it was, from the railwaymen’s viewpoint, more or Jess unimportant whether they spent their waiting-time in barracks or in trains and tents on the Serbian border. Had it not been for activities on the part of the local Balkan commander, Potiorek, most of ‘B-Staffel’ would in fact have arrived in Galicia on schedule, though only because that schedule was in any case preposterously long.