The Eastern Front 1914-1917

by Norman Stone

  These confusions also affected the recruitment of officers. For most of the time, deferments by reason of education were maintained, and the universities of Russia continued at full blast, disturbed at best by ineffective appeals for volunteers. The war ministry grumbled that it needed officer-material. The other ministers asserted that it would be unfair to conscript senior students just as they were about to take their final examinations; and that it would be equally unfair to conscript their juniors while the seniors were being exempted. Neither set was therefore affected—partly because ministers resented the waste of talented men on the army, partly because they feared what the educated classes would do if the State leant on them, and it was not until the end of 1915 that any encroachments were made on the universities. The army of 1916 therefore had 80,000 officers, more than double those of the army of 1915.

  The authorities were at a loss, and could only screw up their existing methods as far as possible. They extended liability for service to the age of fifty; they anticipated conscription, and took in seventeen-year-old boys—thus arriving at the situation, peculiar to Russia, of grandfathers and grandsons leaving for the front, being waved off by the middle, exempted, generation. They exerted increasing pressure, not on the men who had escaped their net before 1914, but on the youngest classes. In June 1915 they extended their recruiting for the classes 1915–18 to include all men who were physically fit, i.e. the standard recruit-contingent of 585,000 with a supernumerary element that would usually have gone to the territorials. In October 1915 they produced a law to allow revision of past exemptions (and then, characteristically, failed to operate it, since re-combing gave them less than 250,000 soldiers throughout the war); finally, in December 1915, they made a new military law that allowed a recruit-contingent of 985,000, applicable to the 1919 class. The Russian army was thus overwhelmingly made up of men aged from seventeen to twenty-five, but its commanders were not often less than sixty years of age. More important in the short run was that the army was coming to an end of the possible recruits. The army for 1916 included 4,587,145 men, and there was a reserve of 1,545,000. But behind it, there was only the anticipated recruit-contingent of 1919, and a further batch of territorials, together not 3,000,000 men. If the war did not end in 1916, the State would have to undertake some conscription of the huge classes of territorials of which there was little record.5 Not surprisingly, Stavka was pressed to win the war before the State had to make this effort. 1916 was the last chance.

  It was an equal paradox of this war that men’s war-aims ran up parallel with the difficulties of attaining them. Theoretically, a State in the vulnerable situation of the Tsarist one should not have exposed itself any longer to war. But there seems to have been very little thought, in circles that mattered, of a separate peace with the Germans, and peace-feelers never went beyond surreptitious and insincere conversations, although the Germans kept trying for more. On the contrary, Russian aims went up, parallel with the sacrifices being demanded of the people; and ministers feared that the whole system would be overthrown if they did not offer satisfaction to the national aspirations. Sazonov and his associates wanted to set up a range of Russian satellite-states in eastern Europe—independent Bohemia, enlarged Serbia, semi-independent and enlarged Poland—and to assert Russian control of the Dardanelles. Much to their surprise, the British took the lead in offering Constantinople, in spring 1915, though themselves making off with the oil-rich areas of the Turkish empire. Somewhat later, as a result of provisions of the inter-allied economic conference, Russia was promised part of the reparations to be exacted from the Central Powers; and by the beginning of 1917 the French were prepared to underwrite a huge Russian empire from Stettin to Trieste and the Straits, in exchange for Russian guarantee of French supremacy in seventeenth-century style, over the Palatinate and the Saar.6 Even many left-wing members of the Provisional Government secretly approved of these aims, and it was not until the November Revolution that they were seriously disavowed.

  In the old days, governments under pressure could always make peace before the crisis bit too deep. Now, they had the physical power to carry on the war for a long time, with hundreds of thousands of recruits, the capacity to supply them, and boundless possibilities for joyous arithmetic in paper-money. Moreover, the First World War both coincided with, and caused, a social dislocation that did much to make war-aims a matter of life and death for important sections of each country, and as the war went on, the increase in social dislocation, far from producing demands for peace, instead produced still greater war-aims, almost independently of vicissitudes at the front. Already before 1914 the comfortable gold-standard world had been under strain, as the process of levelling between sections of the working-class and sections of the middle-class went ahead. This was shown, for instance, in the threefold rise of servants’ wages between 1870 and 1910; it was also shown in the decline, marked from the 1880s, of the middle-class birth-rate, as, particularly in France, middle-class families became prepared to forego children in order to maintain a nanny. The First World War vastly increased these tensions. Wartime inflation—which reduced the value of the pound by almost two-thirds in four years, and the value of other currencies still more—knocked away the great prop of the rentier world, the fixed income. Taxation became more severe; and many middle-class occupations became, in wartime, almost redundant. The wages of actors in Austria, for instance, remained exactly the same throughout the war, although prices rose five or six times; the salary of high bank officials doubled, but the wages of a plumber’s assistant quadrupled.7 Middle-class property was sold off, as the rents on it declined in value: there were considerable rises in peasant-held land in France, and in Italy agricultural ‘squatting’ came to an almost complete end during the war, as even small peasants became able to buy property. At the same time, government spending opened up a whole range of new employment-possibilities for the working-classes; and the decline of middle-class buying-power on the one side, and the opening of these new possibilities, on the other, resulted in a considerable drop, in most countries, of domestic servants. In England, there had been over a million domestic servants in 1914, but by 1920 there were not 400,000. It is not irrelevant to war-aims that half, a million middle-class women were having to do the washing-up for the first time in their lives.*

  After the initial euphoria of 1914, the Left merely tolerated the war, for reasons of national defence; and the sting of their opposition to it was usually removed or lessened by the social benefits that the war conferred. The parties of property, on the other hand, produced great, imperialist war-aims and were less, not more, prepared to compromise as the war proceeded, and Imperialism acquired a more obvious social dimension than ever before. Men assumed that acquisition of an empire would make up for all the supposedly temporary social dislocation of the war. It was, for instance, an almost universal assumption, from Marx to Cecil Rhodes, that the British were wealthy because they had an empire, not that they had one because they could afford it. The state’s rents must be put on their old secure footing; markets must be captured; sources of vital raw-materials acquired; foreign competition eliminated. Each country produced war-aims that summed up its own version of imperialism in the previous century. The British demanded confiscation of the German fleet, and the German merchant-marine; an end to Germany’s colonies; and, particularly, control of the vast oil-areas of the Middle East. The French demanded lesser versions of the same, and put most of their passion into a demand for German gold, a demand dressed up as ‘reparation’. It was again an almost universal illusion that Germany’s industrial advance had been ‘caused’ by French gold, exacted in 1871; now the French would become prosperous at Germany’s expense, and ‘reparations’ continued to be the great indivisible aim of the French rentier class. Similarly, the Germans went on a quest for land in the east, which they sometimes dressed up in their own peculiar version of idecalism. It was a German who best expressed the realities of war-aims in the First World War: Bussc
he-Haddenhausen, of the Foreign Office, who instructed agents in the occupied areas, ‘Russia’s railways, her industry and her whole economy must come under our control. We have no alternative, but to exploit the East; it is there that we shall find the interest-payments for our war-loan’.8 To the Mr. Gulbenkians of Europe, all of this might mean a fabulous five per cent; to the middle-classes, it meant an end to the washing-up. The appeal to force was becoming irresistible, just when force was at its least decisive.

  Despite the war-time problems it encountered, the Russian government was committed to much the same game as its allies, and bid for more gains, the less favourably the war went. Russia’s dependence on the western Powers was now complete, and could not be broken short of a total repudiation of debts or submission to the German empire. One instance of this dependence was the despatch of Russian troops to the western front, more or less nakedly in the style of the Hessian mercenaries sent to fight England’s colonial wars in the eighteenth century. The French had long grumbled that Russia’s front-line strength was no greater than that of France, despite the difference in population-figures; Joffre also grumbled to Zhilinski that France alone was fighting the war. The Russians replied that they would send more men to the front if the men had arms; and the French, in December 1915, proposed instead that a contingent of Russian troops should go to the western front. Doumer, visiting the country late in 1915, even made it clear that despatch of war-goods would be dependent on despatch of a Russian contingent, of 300,000 men, to fight in the west. In the end, four brigades* were sent off, to France and to the new front at Salonica—an obvious exercise in cannon-fodder that Alexeyev would have liked to prevent, but could not, since ‘we are so dependent on the French for war-material that the categorical refusal we should give is out of the question’.9

  At this stage, the allies were bankrupt of strategic ideas. All of them waited for one reason or another. The French had had enough of fighting the war on their own; they wanted the British to take a greater rôle; and they expected the Russians to resume their offensive some time. Operations in ‘the side-shows’, particularly Gallipoli, were a clear failure, but the battle between ‘easterners’ and ‘westerners’ went on regardless. While the western Powers were simply waiting, Falkenhayn struck at Serbia. With 180 battalions and 900 guns, Mackensen attacked the Serbian army, with 120 and 330, in the early days of October. As the offensive succeeded, six double-strength Bulgarian divisions attacked Serbia in flank, in mid-October. The army was pushed towards the south-west, eventually into Albania, where, with the loss of all but 150,000 men, it reached the sea and safety. The Entente were at a loss. They wished to do something to help Serbia, but lacked the will to send serious forces. They pushed Greece into declaring war on the Central Powers, but fumbled the process, and almost caused a Greek declaration of war upon themselves. They then violated Greek neutrality, occupying the port of Salonica with a view to directly assisting the Serbians. But transport-problems, wrangling among the allies, and the failure to contribute substantial troops made this ineffective: in the whole Serbian campaign, there were thirty British casualties. In the end, the Serbian army was moved to Salonica, from its refuge on Corfu, and this front remained a monument to the bungling of autumn 1915.

  There was much grumbling that Russia had done little to help Serbia, a country that came within her sphere. At this stage, Alexeyev was principally concerned that he should not be left in the lurch, as Russians alleged had happned in the summer of 1915, when the Germans attacked Russia without disturbance from the western Powers. It became necessary to document both Russia’s power and willingness to act, so as to exact from the allies a promise that, in 1916, all the Powers—England, France, Italy and Russia—would synchronise their offensive against Germany, which was planned for April. This led Alexeyev to exaggerate his strength* and also to attempt something for the Serbians’ benefit. As the Germans attacked Serbia, he staged some minor offensives in the north-east and in Volhynia, without effect; then, in response to foreign ministry prompting, he decided to assemble a new army on the Black Sea coast, as a general menace to Bulgaria. There were plans for a descent on the Bulgarian coast. On the ground, this operation made less sense than it did in foreign ministry heads, for there were two Turco-German battleships, Goeben and Breslau, in the Black Sea, and their submarines were a threat to the long supply-lines of any amphibious operation on Russia’s part. The Russian navy had, characteristically, too many great battleships and too few smaller vessels capable of dealing with submarine-threats; since the beginning of the war with Turkey, it had done not much more than raid Turkish light-houses and coastal traffic; now, the admirals would not countenance an amphibious operation, and Alexeyev threatened to turn the Black Sea fleet into an infantry brigade. VII Army remained disposed along the Black Sea coast, doing nothing in particular as the Serbians were pushed, throughout November, towards Albania.10

  To achieve at least something—perhaps the intervention of Romania—the new force was sent instead to the Austro-Hungarian front. It was to launch an attack in eastern Galicia and along the Dniester, IX Army co-operating. This operation showed that, although the Russian army might to a large degree have already overcome its material crisis, its commanders had no serious idea as to how this recovery might be put to good use. It began almost as a political manoeuvre, rather than as a military one; there seems to have been little thought as to difficulties of season and terrain, merely a vague confidence that the Austrians would collapse. This vague confidence was not shared by Ivanov, commanding the south-western front. The order for attack came from Stavka on 23rd November; the three corps of VII Army were diverted to eastern Galicia, on the river Strypa; Ivanov did not order the offensive until 12th December. He did so, moreover, only after presenting a bill for supplies no doubt designed to make the most ardent proponent of the offensive stop in his tracks—12,000,000 portions of preserved meat, over 11,000 waggons of fodder.11 He quarrelled with Savvitch, his chief of staff, whom he replaced (by Klembovski) just before the attack was to begin. The new army commander, Shcherbachev, was full of ill-defined fight; but he arrived barely a week before action started, and his troops also knew not at all the ground they were expected to fight on. Commanders seem merely to have felt that Austrians would be easy to defeat.

  Both this battle,12 and that of Lake Narotch that followed in March, illustrated one of the most unfortunate consequences of shell-shortage—the generals’ tendency to blame all their woes on it, and corresponding expectation that, once shell-shortage were no longer in evidence, all would necessarily be well. Men assumed that, once a thousand rounds per field gun were laid in, then a ten-day operation would be possible, and victory only a matter of wrecking enemy defences so that they could be occupied by the infantry. But no-one had any idea how a break-through operation should be planned. It was only in July 1916 that Stavka issued a manual (nastavleniye) on infantry action, one that replaced the pre-war ones hitherto used for instruction of infantry-officers. The troops are said to have left its pages largely uncut. Similarly, the Stavka manual on break-through operations was not much more than a muddled translation of a German manual of 1915. There were of course visits to and from the French front, but to date these had not resulted in the absorption, at the Russian front, of significant information. The problem of combining infantry and artillery still evaded solution, since artillerists and infantrymen would not agree. It was only early in 1916 that Stavka set up an artillery section, Upart , and even then there was not much agreement. The differences between infantry and artillery were to some degree composed only in a demand for huge amounts of shell—4,500,000 rounds per month—which, if realised, would have worn out the army’s guns in a few months. Stavka itself was not only too puzzled, but also too busy, to think things out. Alexeyev worked all but six hours of the day at boxes of telegrams and letters; and, merely to keep pace with the millions of details coming in, the officers of Stavka were kept going fast enough—on 15th February 1916, for
instance, Stavka had to send 442 telegrams, with 45,473 words; on 10th March 140, with 14,240 words, and on 13th March 504 with 52,814 words. During March, 1916, II Army Headquarters had to receive 3,000 persons a day.13 It was not surprising that staffs failed, on the whole, to think things out, while planners in the rear were too remote from events to write manuals that could be taken seriously. The result was that each front had a different system, sometimes privately-printing different manuals of instruction. Trench-systems, for instance, were, even in June 1916, ‘childish’—sited on the sky-line in places, and often over-looked by the Germans.14 There was almost no concept of digging great dug-outs to hold the reserves—in the Bessarabian offensive, these were merely marched over open ground for three miles before they came up to the first Austrian trench.

  In the present case, generals assumed that with crushing numerical superiority and one heavy shell for every square yard of the front—both of them now attained—all would be well. The artillery would pulverise Austrian defences, and the infantry would easily pick up the wreckage. Nine infantry and two cavalry corps were mustered for attack, beginning on 27th December in eastern Galicia. The attempts went on for a fortnight, in which 50,000 men were lost. The initial attacks failed, or at best took a stretch of enemy front trench. Infantry and artillery failed to co-operate; reserves were too far off, and, when they reached the front, not concealed. The Austrians’ guns were well-handled, did not reveal themselves until the last moment, and then did powerful work against the attacking Russians. Shcherbachev and Lechitski reacted by bunching their troops closer together—2. Corps, for instance, took all of VII Army’s heavy guns for the front of one division, hardly more than a kilometre, and used 11,000 heavy shells.15 The Austrian front trench was naturally enough levelled and occupied. But thereafter, the attackers were enfiladed from either side of their kilometre, could not bring their reserves up either in a concealed or in a rapid fashion, such that they had to fall back, in the open, from their gains. An attack of this kind was described: