The Eastern Front 1914-1917

by Norman Stone

  The Russian retreat had been conducted in reasonably good order. The river-system of the northern side held the Germans, and the fortress of Osowiec continued to defy German attempts (even with gas, on 6th August) such that no break-through into the rear of the central Russian armies could be made. The only serious misfortune of the retreat from the Vistula was the fate of Novogeorgievsk. In June, when ideas of retreat were beginning to tell, some consideration had been given to it. Alexeyev, in his heart, knew that fortresses were a trap: if they were at all suitably fortified, they merely reproduced, in a defence-version, the disadvantages normally suffered, in this war, by the attacker—obviousness of target, vulnerability of troops—as well as more traditional supply-problems. But Alexeyev was always easily-swayed by men of higher class than himself. Novogeorgievsk was the symbol of Russian rule in Poland; ‘spiritual motives speak for its defence’. The railways did so also. Evacuation had been left too late, for the trains needed to evacuate Warsaw—government services, army goods, much of the industrial machinery—were under way and there was not much to spare for Novogeorgievsk, or so officers made out. Stavka seemed to think that Novogeorgievsk would be a Przemyśl, not an Antwerp; it should hold for six months. But Przemyśl had really been defended by mud—heavy guns could not be manoeuvred properly—whereas Novogeorgievsk had no such advantage. Its citadel could be fired on by modern artillery, since the forts supposed to protect it had been built only to keep the older type of artillery out of range of the citadel. A new belt of forts had been begun in concrete, continued in brick, and left unfinished. Alexeyev could not spare proper troops for its defence, and sent only ‘the piteous remnant’ of 11. Siberian division, and a second-line division, 63rd, that appears to have had the worst record of any division in the army. 58th, another second-line force with a long and calamitous history, was moved in at the last moment. 1,600 guns and nearly a million shells were none the less kept in the place. As the Germans advanced, they enclosed it early in August. Beseler, conqueror of Antwerp, arrived with a siege-train. On the first day, he captured the chief engineer of Novogeorgievsk, doing the rounds, with a map of the defences on his person. The German artillery overpowered the defenders; one fort was blown up by a single shell. Bobyr surrendered on 19th August. Stavka learnt the news when the last of the fortress’s pilots landed—having been fired on by Russian guns—at Baranovitchi. Alexeyev prayed for an hour and a half.19

  From the beginning of August, a great Russian retreat went on, which lasted until the end of September. The line shortened as armies moved east from the Vistula: by 7th August the salient had been much flattened, by the 22nd the front ran almost perpendicularly from Osowiec—which acted as ‘hinge’ of the retreat—to Brest-Litovsk; by 30th August a further retiral had been completed, to east of Bialystok and Brest-Litovsk; and the retreat went on until the Germans had reached Lida, Baranovitchi, Pinsk, some way into White Russia. Whether this retreat was militarily essential is questionable. Suitable tactics probably would have held the Germans further west. But the generals had swallowed their own propaganda regarding material shortages, and felt they could not afford to fight. They had no faith in their men. They regarded the Germans as invincible. They were probably anxious, too, to ‘bring sense’ to the Russian government and the masses. Finally, they were anxious that reserve-troops should be created, by a shortening of the front, for Courland.

  In theory, as the Russian armies retreated, German and Austrian groups to north and south should have broken through, into their rear, and trapped them. Mackensen and Gallwitz, with thirty-three and a half and twenty divisions respectively, were seemingly well-enough placed to achieve this. Falkenhayn himself wanted it—pressure on the centre should stop the Russians from retreating, while the two wings came forward. But on the ground this was not possible. Every day the Russians would retire three miles or so, construct a new line, and wait for the Germans to stumble up towards it; then a new phase of the retreat would begin. As the retreat went on, the line shortened with abandonment of the Polish salient, so that there were too many German divisions for the front—Gallwitz, for instance, advancing towards Bialystok, could put only five of his divisions in line at one time. In time, the Germans came up to primaeval forest—the Bialowieś woods—and the great marshes of the Pripyat. The railway-lines stopped on the Vistula; even field-railways came only to Ostroleka on the Narev, and supplies had to be dragged forward for the next forty or fifty miles. By 20th August, Gallwitz had lost 60,000 men, well-over one third of his troops; and if the temporarily hors de combat are included, over half. His corps commanders were pessimistic. Watter said that his guns were worn-out, his horses exhausted, and the hay of low quality—yet by 20th August he was 125 kilometres from the railheads. Surén produced much the same story: ‘Progress takes ages… it is not so much the enemy’s strength as the complete impossibility of all observation in terrain of this type’. Even water—in this marshy region—was often difficult to come by, since everything had to be boiled. Conrad’s forces further south encountered similar problems, and Austrian attacks in East Galicia failed to dislodge the Russians from this part of the province. Tarnopol was still in Russian hands. At most, Russian rear-guards would be pierced, and some prisoners made. The Russian retreat went on just the same, the Germans being lucky to find some broken-down cart. Brest-Litovsk, with the example of Novogeorgievsk and, in the outcome, Kovno, before it, was not retained, although its evacuation was done at the last minute. Mackensen took it on 26th August, the Austrians, Kowel on the 21st and Gallwitz, Osowiec20 on the 26th. But these places were taken as the Russians retired. There was not much strategic advantage to the capture. The Germans were full of admiration for the ‘brilliant conduct’ of the Russian retreat.

  The Russian Council of Ministers21 was rather less full of admiration for it. As the army retired, its leaders demanded extension to the east of the area of military administration. Polivanov himself, the war minister, remarked: ‘It was pretty bad in Germany and Poland; it would be national disaster to have it close to Tver and Tula.’ The minister of the interior, Prince Shcherbatov, thought that ‘the picture of military rear-areas is one of sickening outrages, anarchy, arbitrariness’—even children being imprisoned in Warsaw for ‘activities against the State’. The retreat itself was ‘a mad bacchanalia’—Cossacks dragging off refugee-women with their long whips; ‘while thousands of people trudge along the railway-lines they are passed by speeding trains loaded with couches from officers’ clubs, and carrying quarter-masters’ bird-cages’. General Danilov, the supply-chief of Alexeyev’s front, was said to have reserved a train for his mistress. A great flood of refugees—variously estimated at one million people—moved to the east, eventually to be dispersed, in miserable conditions, in the great Russian cities. A British observer noted how one officer, told to manage the movement of refugees over-a solitary bridge over the Bug, made each one pay a toll. The army leaders had proclaimed a new 1812. This was not historically accurate—in 1812, the Russian armies had been pushed back, had not really made a voluntary retreat at all, which was a Tolstoyan fabrication. But even the fabrication was not really imitated, now. A ‘scorched earth’ policy was proclaimed—all movables to be moved, crops to be burned, and so on. In practice, this meant merely a heightened degree of anti-semitism. Land-owners could usually pay to have their crops survive, their movables not moved; some of the great Polish noble families—Potockis, Sapiehas—had links with all three high commands, and could thus ensure complete survival of their estates. The earth was therefore only selectively scorched, and ‘Even the most extreme anti-Semites have been moved to complain at treatment of the Jews’.22

  But the retreat achieved at least some strategic point. The Germans were led into an infertile area, and their supply-problems became overwhelming as they arrived on the Pinsk-Baranovitchi-Slonim positions early in September. They had captured a large number of stragglers and deserters, but the Russian army had remained intact, while, apart from the guns ta
ken in fortresses, and the 250 of Galicia west of the San, only a few tens of guns had been taken in the German advance: Gallwitz, for instance, twenty only in the course of a six-week campaign.

  Only on the northern part of the front was there still a significant German threat. By mid-July, politicians and Stavka alike began to fear that Riga would soon fall. The Germans had taken Mitau, and their cavalry also began to sweep towards the approaches of Kovno. Defence was characteristically inept. The cavalry groups of Grabbe, Trubetskoy and Kaznakov manoeuvred with pretentiousness, to no purpose. The troops of V Army were unreliable, such that, with the withdrawal of the central armies, a new army command was set up to cover Riga (XII Army). Threats to Riga and to Kovno pulled the Russian commanders in two directions, leaving a gap increasingly exploited by the Germans; and the Russian commanders did not feel they had the strength for an offensive that could have reduced the danger. Alexeyev, meanwhile, refused to part with troops for this area. He had his hands full in central Poland, and could see no case for giving any greater superiority of numbers to the armies in Courland than they already had: ten and a half infantry and nine and a half cavalry divisions to the Niemen-Armee’s seven infantry and six and a half cavalry.

  The Germans, too, increased their interest in Courland. Since mid-June, Ludendorff had wanted a full-scale offensive in the north: according to him, it would grip the Russian flank, would lead to collapse of the Russian position in central Poland, and possibly to an entrapping of huge Russian forces in the Polish salient. When, early in August, Falkenhayn decided merely to follow the Russian retreat, Ludendorff wrote that ‘To us it is obvious that Mackensen, Woyrsch (in the centre) and Gallwitz can probably force the Russians to retreat, but not to a decisive end’. Falkenhayn did not see things this way. The northern attack was out of the question for ‘season and terrain’. Mobility was so low that no entrapping-operation of the type planned by Ludendorff offered any more than tactical success—as had indeed been the case with every one of the operations planned, and expensively executed, by Ludendorff since Tannenberg. The Germans would only be led into some wilderness or other. The exchanges became heated. Ludendorff said it was an elementary truth of warfare that flanks were to be preferred to centre. Falkenhayn retorted that ‘a rapid advance on the wings is only possible if there is strong pressure on the centre’. Falkenhayn was right, in this case. The reason for Ludendorff’s successes in Courland was that the great bulk of Russian troops was tied in the centre by Gallwitz and Mackensen. Moreover, Falkenhayn did not mean to go on into Russia. He thought it would stimulate Russian resistance, that it would give supply-problems. He also had other things to do—planning a campaign against Serbia, to open the route to Turkey. A Bulgarian Colonel had already been sent to Pless, and the terms of a military convention discussed. Already in early August Falkenhayn had said that eastern operations must be stopped ‘on the approximate line Brest-Litovsk—Grodno’. Ludendorff objected, as news of the plodding advance of Gallwitz came in; the diarist of his command recorded, ‘It all makes us scream with rage’. The Kaiser, Bethmann Hollweg and others were involved. Falkenhayn won the arguments, as, probably, he deserved to. He cut down Hindenburg’s power in the east, setting up a separate Generalgouvernement in Warsaw under Beseler, and the troops of the German centre as an independent Army Group—Heeresgruppe Prinz Leopold.

  Ludendorff’s plan for a northern attack did not have much sense except in terms of a pinning of Russian reserves in the central theatre more or less as Falkenhayn perceived. With such pinning, the German Niemen-Armee did well in Courland, and X Army could advance towards Kovno. Alexeyev was transfixed by the problems of extricating his central armies—I, II, IV, XIII, III—at a time when all had been sharply reduced in numbers23—in the case of I Army to 100,000, of XIII Army, to 63,000, of III Army, to 55,000, or less than half their complements, in III Army’s case one-third. Stavka was deeply worried that the Germans might land on the Baltic coast, even threaten Petrograd; inspection of the defences of the capital revealed that the way at Pskov was quite open to attack. The Duma and the government set up an outcry. Yet the western Powers, who had promised an offensive in France for much of the summer, remained passive. Appeals went off to Joffre in the name of the heroic Russian army, to which the French said ‘Amen’ and went on as before.24 The British, in particular, had a cornucopia of inter-Allied banalities into which they delved deeply when they were driving a hard bargain. Their offensive did not take place until the end of September, even then to little strategic consequence. Yanushkevitch’s fears for the Baltic coast were now boundless. He interfered again and again with Alexeyev’s conduct of operations there, even wondering why commanders did not lead their men from the front line—a curious observation from a chief of staff who never once saw the front line. He told Alexeyev to send the Guard Corps—then counting 27,000 men—to stave off a quite imaginary threat to Pernau. Alexeyev, who needed the Guard to cover his retreat against Mackensen, temporised. A categorical order caused him to send it to Vilna and a division to Kovno, ‘with an extremely heavy heart, and only in view of the alleged indispensability of the transfer’.25 Stavka now felt that the responsibilities were too great for Alexeyev alone; a new, northern, front must be set up. As befitted the national emergency, an orthodox relic was selected to command it—Ruzski. The division of fronts occurred on 17th August, and in this period Ruzski’s front rose to twenty-eight divisions, Alexeyev’s sixty-one, Ivanov’s twenty-five.

  But before the northern front could be built up to such proportions, a German offensive was under way in the north. It occurred at a time of abnormal confusion on the Russian side, since Alexeyev had washed his hands of the northern front before Ruzski took it over. X Army and V Army were not co-operating—V drawn into the Courland battles, X into those on the Bobr, near Grodno. The fortress of Kovno co-operated with neither army. It was an object-lesson in the non-role of fortresses in the First World War. It contained a large number of guns—1,360, 350 of them heavy—and had received desultory fortification before 1914. It was too imposing to be abandoned, in the way Osowiec or Pultusk might be abandoned. But it had serious weaknesses—no barracks, other than those for gunners, no underground communications, and a basic belt of forts built for the conditions of 1880. Grigoriev, the commander, was aged nearly seventy, and had learned little of modern war except that Germans could not be defeated. He prevented initiatives by his subordinates—particularly the artillery commander—but took none himself, visiting one of the forts, at that only once. The defence lacked management—as Germans took one fort, guns of another would fire by mistake at a fort still maintained by Russians. Grigoriev seems to have given up hope because of the garrison he received—a second-line division and a mob of territorials, most of them arriving in Kovno only a week before the siege. On one of the forts, preparation for gunnery was such that only one battery had even a brick emplacement, the others being not camouflaged at all. In another area woods half a mile away had not been cleared. The German bombardment was effective, in circumstances of this kind. The garrison panicked, and on 17th August Grigoriev himself fled, having to be chased, subsequently, by the gendarmerie—for which he was sentenced to fifteen years’ hard labour. The German X Army took, here, over 1,300 guns, 53,000 rounds of heavy shell, and over 800,000 of light shell.26

  The fall of Kovno marked the end of the old Stavka. It is impossible to tell the course of events, here, since the Tsar did not reveal what was in his mind. But Polivanov appeared in Stavka by train, failed to call on Yanushkevitch, commandeered the Stavka Rolls and motored to consult Alexeyev. Shortly after, the Tsar sent word that Grand Duke Nicholas would henceforth be Viceroy of the Caucasus; and, to universal shock, the Tsar declared that he would take the supreme command himself. His motives for doing so can only be guessed at. He knew that Grand Duke Nicholas enjoyed much popularity in ‘enlightened’ Russia—the students of Petrograd University went on strike when he was dismissed27—such that to get rid of the Grand Du
ke would need a very high card. The Grand Duke had engaged in political activity—had promoted the cause of capitalists in war-contracts, had supported the Duma liberals. In the summer political crisis, he had often been mentioned as a possible replacement for the Tsar. The Tsar would no doubt have removed him before; the fall of Kovno, and threats to Riga, provided an opportunity when Stavka’s prestige was running down. On 1st September, the Tsar himself took over the supreme command. His chief of staff was Alexeyev, who passed command of the new western front to Evert.*

  In this period of confusion, the strained situation on the Niemen continued. The German, Morgen, showed much virtuosity, persuading Ruzski that there would soon be a German offensive towards Petrograd, with a naval landing on the Baltic coast, such that Ruzski bunched his new forces at Friedrichstadt and Dvinsk, leaving a fifty-mile gap between V and X Armies that could be covered only by cavalry. X Army had been shaken by the fall of Kovno, and had to execute a complicated manoeuvre from Grodno, protecting its northern flank and Vilna. Ludendorff could also profit from the delay in shifting north the Russian troops of the centre, for Alexeyev was still more worried that their front would collapse than that Ruzski’s front might be pierced. Many of these central divisions had lost heavily from German battering, from desertion and sickness. One—27. infantry division of 31. Corps, which was not even particularly hard-hit by the then standards, lost 8,848 men and 90 officers (5,385 wounded, 1,951 missing) between mid-June and mid-September, being reduced from 6,500 rifles on 30th July to 3,500 on 25th September, and its Corps—nominally with four divisions—to 13,300 men with 354 officers,28 Alexeyev was still reluctant to divert such troops to the north, an area he regarded as already substantially-covered.

  This left an area that Ludendorff could still exploit. Early in September he put into effect the great northern offensive with which he had entertained Falkenhayn since July. He did so against Falkenhayn’s will. Falkenhayn had already warned the eastern commanders in August that they would have to stop, and he repeated the instruction on 2nd September. Ludendorff ‘misunderstood’ the instruction, and Conrad, also anxious to invade Russian territory, did so as well. Even the central commanders—Linsingen, Woyrsch, Prince Leopold—on whom Falkenhayn could normally rely, blundered forward into the Pripyat marshes, although, with a Balkan offensive being prepared, they could not count on much support. The preconditions for success were dwindling.29 In July and August, Ludendorff had done well in the north largely because of continual pressure on the Russian centre. The pressure now slackened—partly because of the terrain, partly because the quality of German troops was running down, partly because the line had been so shortened—from 1,700 kilometres to 1,000—that Russian reserves could now be freed for the northern sector. Moreover, the Russian output of shell was increasing: 100,000 rounds per week in July, 220,000 in September, while reserve-troops began to come in greater numbers. X Army around Vilna had 105,000 men, most of them with rifles, and 600 guns, with up to 200 shells to use.