The Eastern Front 1914-1917

by Norman Stone

  The preparation ordered by Brusilov’s staff was thorough beyond anything hitherto seen on the eastern front. The front-trenches were sapped forward, in places to within fifty paces of the enemy lines—at that, on more or less the entire front. Huge dug-outs for reserve-troops were constructed, often with earth ramparts high enough to prevent enemy gunners from seeing what was going on in the Russian rear. Accurate models of the Austrian trenches were made, and troops trained with them; aerial photography came into its own, and the position of each Austrian battery noted—an innovation, since on the other fronts pilots were not given any training in aerial photography at all. The fact, too, that reserve-troops were under the same command for a number of months also helped organisation—another comparative rarity.

  Preparation of this intensity was comparatively rare on the Russian front. According to Klembovski, on most of the other front-sectors, communications-trenches were primitive; there were not even notice-boards showing where troops should go. In some areas, foreign observers were astonished to find gaps of three miles between the enemy lines, on occasion even with inhabited villages in no-man’s-land. It took much pressure from Brusilov himself to make sure that subordinates undertook novel work of the type he had in mind; and Brusilov himself appears to have been the best type of commander—striking the fear of God into his subordinates, but never to the point where they became terrified of responsibility. He was himself a tireless worker, but not one like Alexeyev—for whom work became an end in itself. He and his staff paid continual visits to the very front lines, again a considerable rarity, although Brusilov, as the example of 1917 was to show, lacked the common touch. He had to deal with innumerable objections from his subordinates. Kaledin, commanding VIII Army, showed little stomach for action; Lechitski, of IX Army, complained continually of poor heavy artillery; Shcherbachev, one of the cavalry-General Staff would-be imitators of French methods, also had his own schemes and grumbled at Brusilov’s challenge to French supremacy. Only, perhaps, Sakharov of XI Army had much sympathy with what Brusilov was attempting. For Brusilov to force, not only the three dissenting army commanders, but also the dissenting Alexeyev, to accept his methods shows tactical skills of an unusually high order. By mid-May preparation was complete.5

  The Russian plan Was for four separate attacks to be made, by each of the armies on the entire front; and the front of attack was not to be less than thirty kilometres. The plan seemed impossible—what had eluded a single, immensely strong group on one short front was now to be attempted by four much weaker groups on longer fronts. Overall, the Russian superiority was not at all marked. Brusilov reckoned it at 132,000 men. In terms of divisions, it was a superiority of insignificant proportions—forty infantry and fifteen cavalry divisions to thirty eight and a half and eleven, 1,770 light and 168 heavy guns to 1,301 light and 545 medium and heavy. There were over 600,000 Russian soldiers to about 500,000 Austro-Germans. The separate armies certainly lacked decisive superiority of any kind. VIII Army, which had the main task of breaking through towards Lutsk, had fifteen divisions to thirteen, 640 light guns to 375 and 76 heavy guns to 174. On other fronts, the Russian superiority barely existed at all. IX Army had ten infantry and four cavalry divisions to nine and four, 448 light and forty-seven heavy guns to 350 and 150, VII Army with seven infantry and three cavalry divisions was roughly equal to the defenders, while XI Army was actually weaker than them in all ways. Brusilov, seemingly, would merely bombard for a short while and then his troops would walk forward. It is true that, for light shell, there were now no alarms. VIII Army had 2,000 rounds per gun—160,000 light and 40,000 heavy shells surplus to a requirement of 100 rounds per day, and there were also 52,000 Japanese shells. IX Army had a similar surplus of light shell—87,000. Austro-Hungarian guns are reckoned to have had 400 rounds apiece, though in the confusion many of these were not fired. Certainly, such quantities of shell were much less than had been present in March, 1916. The enemy line was also very strong. Alexeyev raised continual alarms, up to the last moment begging Brusilov to attack only on one front,7 at that shortening his front of attack to twenty kilometres. Kaledin seemed near the verge of break-down at times, and Brusilov had again and again to go to Rovno to put heart into him. Lechitski, for IX Army, rose from his sick-bed aghast at what had been done in his name and protested that he would have to face 100,000 Austro-Hungarians with ‘an extremely insignificant quantity of heavy artillery’. It is curious, and significant, to note that the Austro-Hungarian commander subsequently put down his immense defeat in this area to ‘enemy heavy artillery of undreamed-of effect’8 of which there was ‘a huge superiority’. None the less, attacks were set by Brusilov to begin on 4th June.

  The great victory that followed was simply put down by all observers to the low quality of the Austro-Hungarian army. Victories against these troops could not have any lessons for the serious belligerent states, any more than victories over Neapolitan troops in the nineteenth century could. The opinion was widely-held in Germany—beginning, of course, with Falkenhayn. But it was also, most curiously, put about by the Austro-Hungarian official historians; and similarly Berndt, chief of staff in IV Army, reckoned that ‘the main cause’ of defeat was the surprisingly low fighting quality of the troops.9 The Slav soldiers are held to have surrendered at once: an opinion, naturally enough, supported by Slav propagandists. Conrad himself was usually too loyal to blame his own men for letting him down; but he slipped all too easily into such talk when the situation required.

  But what was said later does not at all accord with what was said at the time, by the units involved. Neither IV nor VII Army—which faced the greatest defeats—show the slightest record of shell-shortage in June 1916. More surprisingly, there is not the slightest indication in either force of fear for the morale or the fighting qualities of the men—at divisional level, or at corps or army level. There had of course been worries before, in September 1915 particularly. In May 1916, there appears to be not the slightest alarm.10 The incidence of desertion was less than normal, and in any case trivial—from 15th to 30th April, for instance, losses came to 439 killed and wounded men, 2,476 sick, thirty-nine missing, for an army of over 100,000 combatants. Yet on one day there had been 129 Russian deserters, which appears to have been the rule. The sick-lists could be an important indication of morale. It is true that the command of IV Army noted, on 22nd April, ‘the surprisingly high sick-lists’ of 10. Corps (Martiny) and 2. Corps (Kaiser)—1,048 in 10. Corps in the first half of April. But these ran down again as the spring drizzles gave way to summer—losses of all types, in this force of 30,000 men, came to 689 in the first half of May, 674 in the second half. Far from being alarmed about its troops, IV Army command recorded in mid-May that ‘reports on the troops’ fighting qualities read relatively favourably’; and an order of the high command itself singled out a largely Czech unit, 25. infantry division, as an example of how commanders could, with the help of priests, ‘ethically influence’ their troops. IV Army was offered more of such ‘appropriate clergymen’, but turned down the offer. If morale was as bad as subsequently made out, then clearly the commanders were not doing their jobs. As things were, sick-lists, soldiers’ letters, discipline in general seem to have offered few signs for alarm—at least, none were reported. It could of course be that alarms were not reported by divisional and regimental officers so as to avoid trouble, discredit. But on the whole it seems unlikely. The truth of the matter seems to be that if such troops were ably commanded, they fought well. If they were not ably commanded, then they collapsed much more than other troops might have done—partly because of the language gap, partly because of the class-gap between officer and man. In the outcome, it was probably easier for Ruthenes to surrender since they knew they might expect favourable treatment at Russian hands. But the heart of the matter was leadership.

  What is much more evident in the records of the defeated Austrian forces than concern for morale is the almost Spanish-Habsburg combination of serenity and in
competence they reveal. There were of course innumerable reports of impending Russian action—the arrival of troops was noted perfectly accurately on the Austrian side, despite Brusilov’s precautions. Deserters announced, for instance, two days before the attack that clean underclothing had been issued—the event that had made them desert. Austrian pilots noted the construction of Russian dug-outs, the famous platsdarmy for reserves. In particular, the units reported continual Russian sapping-forward, as, following Brusilov’s instructions, Russian trenches were being brought to within seventy-five paces of the Austrian front line. What is curious is the Austrian units’ failure to stop this sapping, which, evidently, would give the attacker an advantage. Commanders seem to have reported when they stopped it, not when it continued—no doubt for fear they would be driven into troublesome minor actions. Indeed, IV Army command and the command of Heeresgruppe Linsingen seem to have learned of one or two quite large-scale events from the Russian press—which called down a severe reprimand from Linsingen, and subsequently also IV Army command, that ‘reports should be accurate and detailed’. It is no doubt this failure to stop Russian sapping that brought losses to such trivial figures in May—not 500 men killed and wounded in a force of over 100,000 men that should have been stopping Russian night-work and patrolling. Perhaps, too, this holiday-camp atmosphere had something to do with the drop in desertions.

  Certainly, the affairs of the Austro-Hungarian IV Army command were conducted in a spirit of wonderful frivolity. The chief of staff, Berndt, left a diary that is very revealing.11 He had been put in this command, under Archduke Joseph Ferdinand—godson of Emperor Franz Joseph—much against his will. After the catastrophe before Rovno in September 1915, Conrad had wanted to dismiss Archduke Joseph Ferdinand.12 But he had—for obvious reasons—been given such prominence in army communiqués that Conrad would have lost some credibility had he dismissed the Archduke. Instead, he dismissed Paić, the chief of staff, and moved in Berndt, in whom he had faith. The Archduke subjected poor Berndt, to continual slights—would not use the same automobile as Berndt, preferring to drive with the automobile-officer, ‘the Jew, Strauss’, gossiped and joked with subalterns at the expense of senior officers, treated horses with savagery, making low conversation at table before a prudish Berndt and still more disapproving German officers. He surrounded himself with aristocratic playboys—his brother Heinrich, Prince René of Bourbon-Parma and Kommandant Graf Berchtold, son of the foreign minister—of whom Berndt pertinently observed, ‘That the foreign minister who began this war has got his son taken out of its dangers, is painful’. The Archduke’s relations with his German superior officer, Linsingen, were extremely tense. He resented Linsingen’s position. On 26th February he was gazetted ‘Colonel-General’—hence superior to Linsingen, no longer subject to the army group commander’s orders, and likely to take over the group himself. ‘Like lightning’ there came back a German response—Linsingen also promoted Colonel-General (Generaloberst), the appointment pre-dated to 20th February. Linsingen’s chief of staff, Stolzmann, turned up to inspect IV Army. Archduke Joseph Ferdinand objected to his ‘snuffling around’ and took him, through heavy rain, in an open motor-car. Then he went on a three-day hunting trip, in a boat along the river Styr, with his brother. All this reflected vast confidence in the strength of the defences built up since autumn 1915. There were three positions, each with three trenches. The dug-outs were buttressed with concrete, the officers’ quarters even had windows. There were concrete enfilading-points for machine-guns. Stolzmann turned up in Teschen to report to Conrad just before the Russian attack opened. The Russians had no numerical superiority; ‘they attack quite stupidly in thick masses, and they can’t possibly succeed this time’. Linsingen similarly explained to the German Kaiser that ‘our formidable positions’ would ‘automatically hold’ against an enemy ‘of the present strength’. Even an ‘Anfangserfolg’ was ‘impossible’.13

  The truth was that the Austrians had passed into a mood of almost grandiose confidence. By the middle of 1916, old tunes were being played in Vienna; in Teschen, Conrad’s headquarters, the voices of Prince Eugene and Radetzky were once more heard—the Prussians snubbed, the Balkans ruled, the Poles about to join the Habsburg Empire. An expedition against northern Italy was almost automatically the outcome of this mood, and it was towards this that Austrian efforts were now bent. It produced a fatal diversion of the Central Powers’ war-effort, from which Brusilov could greatly profit.

  The Central Powers’ alliance had begun to weaken towards the end of the Serbian campaign, late in 1915. Conrad had been irritated that Germany took such preponderance in the area; he resented depending on Bulgaria, feared Bulgarian ambitions in Albania and elsewhere, and even considered making a separate peace with the Serbians in order to contain these ambitions. Falkenhayn was not concerned, and also rejected a plan of Conrad’s for invading Greece, capturing Salonica. All he wanted to achieve, from the military viewpoint, was some kind of passable situation in the Balkans; while indirect German control over Bulgaria, perhaps even of Albania through Bulgaria, suited him politically much better than direct Austrian control of anything. The two powers also quarrelled over matters of peace. The Germans hoped to win the war outright. This meant an offensive in the west. The Austrians were not nearly so pledged to this end—on the contrary, an outright German victory would worry them almost as much as an outright allied victory. They were in much the same position as Italy in 1942, ‘if England wins, we lose; if Germany wins, we are lost’. They took a quite different view of the military situation. Conrad and Tisza agreed, at the turn of the year, that ‘There can be no question of destroying the Russian war-machine; England cannot be defeated; peace must be made in not too long a space, or we shall be fatally weakened, if not destroyed’.14

  But when the Austrians charged off in the direction of peace, as they frequently did throughout the war, they were always brought up short on the Italian rope. Italy was the major enemy as far as almost all the peoples of the Habsburg Empire were concerned. Czechs, Germans, Slovenes, Croats were alike enthusiastic to fight Italian pretensions—indeed, the popular enthusiasm among Slav peoples such as the Slovenes for war with Italy was such that even the army authorities were on occasion embarrassed, fearing that the formation, for instance of Slovene volunteer groups using Slovene national colours, was a hidden prelude to some challenge to the German character of much of the army. The heroic defence of the frontier against Italy had given the peoples of the Monarchy a cause that united them as no other did; as in 1848, an Italian campaign could do much to settle internal discontents, to make the Austrian army genuinely popular. It was not surprising that Conrad should have profited from the long months of inactivity in winter 1915–16 to plan an attack on Italy, intending it no doubt as prelude to some acceptable peace. He could not hope for superiority of numbers, but he could assemble sufficient force in the north-western sector of the front for some break-through to be thinkable: Austrian troops would emerge from the mountains of the north-west, and cut off much of the Italian army on the northern and north-eastern sectors of the Italian front, particularly the attackers of the Isonzo. Contrary to legend, he did not detach for the Italian offensive significant numbers of men and guns from the eastern front. But he did remove a few of his better-class brigades and some heavy artillery; in particular, he diverted much shell to the Italian front, where each gun now had to have over a thousand rounds in its immediate reserve. He neglected to strengthen the eastern front as the Russians were strengthening it.

  But what mattered more than this was the almost complete diversion of Germany from the Austro-Hungarian part of the Russian front. Late in 1915, Falkenhayn had decided to resume German attacks in the west. He knew that Germany could not win the three-front war; there was only one way of making an acceptable peace, to weaken England’s will to win, which he regarded as the motor of the enemy coalition. This could be achieved if he could knock out ‘the sword of England on the continent’—the F
rench army. But a straight-forward break-through operation in the west would not work. Falkenhayn adopted the plan he had used with such effect in the east, in summer 1915. He would attack a point where the French army could not afford retreat—in this case, Verdun—and assemble a huge force of heavy artillery that would bleed the French army white. German attacks would be designed merely to force the French to bring up more and more reserves, to be pulverised by the heavy artillery, perhaps also forced into costly counter-attacks. It was a method that owed much to German experience of summer 1915 on the Russian front. Falkenhayn’s analysis was also perceptive. The French would not carry out the retreat the situation demanded of them: they behaved as Falkenhayn had predicted, and lost much more heavily, in the first six weeks of the Verdun campaign, than the Germans did—almost the only case in the First World War where the ostensible defenders lost more heavily than the attackers. But the analysis went wrong in so far as Falkenhayn under-rated French capacity to resist, for the French army brilliantly survived the bleeding-white that Falkenhayn had prepared; moreover, the British, far from having their will to win weakened, merely brought in armies of their own for the summer offensive of 1916. The offensive had begun on 21st February; by early April, it was clear that, while Falkenhayn might cause the French high losses, Germany would lose very greatly in terms of prestige, since Verdun had held out so well. Falkenhayn allowed himself to be dragged by the local army commanders into attempting a break-through operation at Verdun, again and again, such that German losses began to exceed French ones—and still Verdun held. Falkenhayn was drawn into a costly blunder, not unlike the pattern of late summer 1915, when he had also been drawn into the Sventsiany-Vilna affair against his better judgment. This was not a war in which generals with limited aims could, in the end, make the pace.