A World Undone

by G. J. Meyer

  Berlin, as it happened, already had a draft of such an alliance ready for use and eagerly wired it to Constantinople. It would require Turkey to enter any war in which Germany became involved. The Young Turks, unprepared for such a drastic commitment, made excuses for not signing. Meanwhile they were secretly approaching Russia about a possible alliance in that direction. The Russians, confident at this early stage of the Entente’s ability to overwhelm the Central Powers, brushed this overture aside. To them it seemed little more than a pathetic request that they refrain from seizing Constantinople.

  While the Turks dawdled, two swift and powerful German warships, the Göben and the Breslau, were playing a game of hide-and-seek across the Mediterranean with the British and French fleets. On August 10, pursued by their enemies after shelling the coast of Algeria, the two vessels arrived at the entrance to the Dardanelles and requested permission to enter. Enver Pasha, Turkey’s thirty-four-year-old minister of war and a dominant figure among the Young Turks, found himself under intense pressure from all sides. His German advisers insisted that he admit the ships. British and French diplomats demanded a refusal. He tried to delay, but when the Germans insisted on an immediate decision, he yielded. The Göben and the Breslau were allowed to steam north to Constantinople. Later, when their pursuers arrived at the straits, they were turned away. The Dardanelles were thus sealed, with three hundred and fifty thousand tons of Russian exports suddenly unable to reach the Mediterranean from the Black Sea.

  Even that did not settle the matter. Even when the Germans presented the Göben and Breslau as a gift to the Turkish government (it was an empty gesture: the ships were given Turkish names but retained their German crews and continued to take their orders from Berlin), the Turks declined to commit. Everything remained unresolved until the end of September, when, for the precise purpose of precipitating a crisis, the two German ships steamed up the Bosporus strait into the Black Sea. Flying the Turkish flag, they shelled the Russian cities of Feodosiya, Odessa, and Sebastopol. The Young Turks, as alarmed as the Russians by news of this attack, hastened to assure St. Petersburg that they remained neutral, that the attack had been a German act. The Russians replied that the Turks could prove their good faith by expelling the Germans. This they were powerless to do. On November 30, after an Entente ultimatum went unanswered, Russia declared war on Turkey. Britain and France did the same a few days later.

  Though Turkey’s alliance with the Central Powers was a serious setback for the Entente, some of Britain’s leaders thought it opened new options. Being invulnerable to invasion, the British—unlike the French and Russians—had never been required to commit themselves to any theater of operations. By early 1915, thanks to the arrival of units of the regular army from distant parts of the empire and of colonial forces from India, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, Sir John French had more than three hundred thousand troops under his command. Hundreds of thousands more, the “Kitchener’s armies” made up of men who had flocked to recruiting centers at the start of the war, were in training back in England. The question was what to do with all this power. The answer was obvious to many senior members of the army and the cabinet, but they were far from united on exactly what they thought was so obvious.

  French himself, despite the horrors of Ypres, was as convinced as Joffre that the German defenses could be cracked open, and he was as eager as Joffre to prove it. Consistent exaggeration of German casualties had helped to persuade him that the enemy must be approaching exhaustion. Entente propagandists depicted almost every fight in the West as a slaughter of Germans mounting robotlike suicide attacks, when in fact German losses were often markedly lower than those of the Entente. Back in London, the army’s director of military operations produced an analysis supposedly demonstrating that Germany was going to run out of men “a few months hence.” (This hopeful myth was slow to die. Before June 1915 another operations director would predict that if Britain would “keep hammering away…we shall wear Germany out and the war will be over in six months.”) Though French like Joffre wanted to stay on the offensive, he remained unwilling to do so under Joffre and even reluctant to do so with Joffre. He continued to demand the freedom to operate independently. There was one final point, however, on which Joffre and French were in complete agreement: every available British soldier, they insisted, should be sent to the Western Front at the earliest possible moment.

  Early in January, French went to London and met with the British War Council, a new planning body whose seven members included Asquith, Kitchener, Churchill, Grey, and Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George. He proposed a new offensive that would follow the coast and be aimed at recapturing the Belgian Channel ports. Churchill supported this idea, seeing in it a way to bring neutral Holland into the war on the Entente side and, by drawing more German troops to the west, to prepare the way for a landing of troops on Germany’s Baltic coast. At first the council turned French’s proposal down. Most members regarded it as too risky to justify the possible gains and also as contrary to the wishes of Joffre, who wanted the British to attack not along the coast but, again, near Ypres. Days later the idea was brought back to life, not as an approved plan but as a possibility to be kept under consideration. Asquith was unfriendly to the idea. Kitchener was absolutely opposed. What he wanted—it was not a thing to be talked about openly—was to keep Britain’s new armies at home until the French and Germans had exhausted each other. Then London could send masses of fresh troops across the Channel and decisively tip the scales. “The German armies in France may be looked upon as a fortress that cannot be carried by assault,” Kitchener told French. The British lines, he added, “may be held by an investing force while operations proceed elsewhere.”

  Elsewhere. For Kitchener and Churchill and others, that became a kind of dream. Shaken by the destruction of the BEF’s first divisions and hoping to avoid a repeat, they began looking for less painful ways to prosecute the war. Grand Duke Nicholas was encouraging their search by sending telegrams to Kitchener, asking him to make a show of force in the Middle East and thereby oblige the Turks to suspend their offensives in Persia and the Caucasus. A campaign in Syria was one idea; by drawing the Turks from the north, it could free Russian troops for the Eastern Front. A Baltic landing was another option; the navy was building a fleet of six hundred motor barges and other craft for an invasion (by Russian troops, though St. Petersburg had not been informed) of Germany’s Pomeranian coast. Still another possibility, one less fraught with risk than the Baltic scheme, was the landing of an Entente force at the port of Salonika, in northwestern Greece. Greece was not even in the war (it was one of the several neutral states being courted by both sides), but the council hoped that the injection of Entente troops into the southern Balkans might win over not only Greece but Romania, Bulgaria, and Italy. An army moving northward out of Salonika could secure Serbia. Then, reinforced, it might be able to invade Austria-Hungary. Kitchener liked this idea. So did Lloyd George, who as chancellor of the exchequer was not necessarily a central figure in Britain’s military planning but was making himself one by sheer force of will.

  Finally there were the Dardanelles, which had already been briefly attacked by a British ship at the end of 1914 and had demonstrated no ability to resist. Renewed action there in greater force could create problems for all the Central Powers. Churchill sent a telegram asking the commander of the British fleet in the eastern Mediterranean if a naval force could fight its way through the Dardanelles to Constantinople. When the admiral replied that this might be accomplished “by extended operations with a large number of ships,” Churchill was satisfied. He instructed the admiral to submit a detailed plan for such an operation.

  The Dardanelles were becoming elsewhere.

  Just a week into the new year, two offensives that Joffre had put in motion in France’s Champagne and Artois regions were essentially at an end. The French advanced only five hundred yards in three weeks and by January 8, with the Germans launching coun
terattacks, had added tens of thousands of casualties to their dizzily rising total. The Champagne operation alone, by the time it was shut down, had cost ninety thousand French casualties. Even then Joffre did not give up. He would try again in February and yet again in March, continuing to think that he was on the verge of a breakthrough. The British War Council felt confirmed in its skepticism about the Western Front and about Sir John French’s promises of success.

  The Germans, while successful in holding their line against this endless hammering, were still divided on strategy. No mechanism existed by which Germany’s competing strategists could discuss their differences in any systematic way. The kaiser, the “All-High Warlord,” rarely attempted to bring them together, and as a result the rivalries within the high command could only fester. Clear policy formulation was replaced by backstabbing and bickering. Those who wanted to concentrate on the Western Front tried in childish ways to undercut and discredit their rivals. (Falkenhayn, for example, deleted the names of Hindenburg and Ludendorff from reports of success in the east.) The “easterners” not only responded in kind but plotted to have Falkenhayn dismissed. The kaiser, meanwhile, neither led nor allowed anyone else to do so. A crisis was inevitable. But instead of experiencing a leadership crisis, the high command went through a series of such crises that lasted a year and a half.

  Falkenhayn’s position remained ambiguous in the extreme. He wanted to win the war in the west, but also to make the Russians willing to negotiate. When he refused Conrad’s request for help in a winter offensive, then refused again when Hindenburg demanded that his unassigned new corps be sent to the east, Hindenburg and Ludendorff announced that they were detaching three and a half divisions from their own Ninth Army and sending them to Conrad. In any army this would have bordered on insubordination. By the traditions and standards of the Prussian army, it was little short of shocking. Falkenhayn protested to the kaiser. Hindenburg responded with an appeal of his own for the kaiser’s support. The battle for control over German strategy was joined.

  Falkenhayn’s next move was clever but certain to enrage his rivals. He used his double-barreled authority as head of the general staff and war minister to declare that the troops being sent from Hindenburg’s army to Conrad would become the core of a new Army of the South. This army would be commanded by General Alexander von Linsingen, a protégé of Falkenhayn’s, who would report not to Hindenburg but to Falkenhayn himself. Ludendorff was named Linsingen’s chief of staff. With this move, Falkenhayn dissolved the team that had given Germany its only victories and diminished the authority of its leading members.

  Refusal to obey was out of the question, and Ludendorff prepared to go south. Before departing, he joined Hindenburg in drafting—essentially dictated for the old man’s signature—a telegram to the kaiser. “I have grown into close union with my Chief of Staff,” it said. “He has become to me a true helper and friend, irreplaceable by any other, one on whom I bestow my fullest confidence. Your majesty knows from the history of war how important such a happy relationship is for the conduct of affairs and the well-being of the troops.” Edging closer to direct criticism of what Falkenhayn was doing, the telegram added that Ludendorff’s “new and so much smaller sphere of action does not do justice to the General’s comprehensive ability and great capacity.” It ended on a groveling note: “I venture most respectfully to beg that my war comrade may graciously be restored to me as soon as the operation in the south is under way.”

  The telegram sent, Ludendorff departed. Within hours he was in the south, involved with Linsingen and Conrad in finalizing arrangements for an advance out of the Carpathians. Even when he was deeply embroiled in military politics at their most vicious, even when he was using every trick at his disposal against his rivals, Ludendorff remained a resourceful, focused, and indefatigable strategist. He had added a team of talented code-breakers to his staff, and thanks to their work he knew what Grand Duke Nicholas was planning. Conrad had been right in expecting a new Russian attack through the Carpathians, but decoded messages showed that this was not all the Russians had in mind. Simultaneously they were planning to renew operations in East Prussia, and still other Russian armies were to drive through Poland into the German heartland. Ludendorff’s response was exactly as it had been when he was faced with apparently overwhelming odds in 1914. Instead of allowing the enemy to take the initiative, he would strike first. Again he saw an opportunity not just to hold off the Russians but, with coordinated attacks in the north and south, to cripple them.

  Falkenhayn, in the aftermath of his restructuring of German forces in the east, was drawn into the planning of this campaign. On January 11 he met with Conrad, Linsingen, and Ludendorff at Breslau. Their talks were polite if not cordial. Falkenhayn thought it was little better than madness to launch an offensive against superior forces in mountain country in midwinter, and he said so. Conrad replied coolly that he knew the country in question and knew what he was doing. On the following day, at Posen, Falkenhayn met with the old Tannenberg team of Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and Hoffmann. This more private gathering was not a happy one; the pent-up resentments of the past months boiled over. By all accounts, Hindenburg and his lieutenants treated their commanding general with open contempt. Hindenburg told Falkenhayn that he did not have the confidence of the men under his command and should resign. After Falkenhayn’s departure, Ludendorff and Hoffmann talked Hindenburg into sending another telegram to the kaiser. This one was not at all groveling. It demanded the dismissal of Falkenhayn, the dispatch of the four new corps to the east, and the return of Ludendorff to Hindenburg’s staff. Behind it lay the unmistakable threat that Hindenburg was prepared to resign.

  The showdown appeared to be at hand. The kaiser, offended by Hindenburg’s presumption and regarding Ludendorff as “a dubious character devoured by personal ambition,” declared that he wanted them both court-martialed. Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, ordinarily all too willing to stay out of military affairs, was horrified. He replied that public punishment of the hero of Tannenberg was unthinkable, that it was Falkenhayn who should be dismissed. Almost the entire imperial court was drawn into the struggle. Falkenhayn’s enemies, influenced negatively by his warnings of a long war and positively by Hindenburg’s and Ludendorff’s assurances that the war need not be long at all, were numerous and influential. The kaiser’s wife, Empress Augusta Victoria, was active among them. So was Crown Prince Wilhelm. Even Moltke, encouraged by Bethmann to hope that Falkenhayn’s fall might restore him to leadership, said Falkenhayn must go. But Falkenhayn retained the support that at this point still mattered most: that of Kaiser Wilhelm, who acted at last. Falkenhayn would remain at the head of the general staff, the kaiser announced, but would give up the war ministry. The contested army corps would be sent to the east, which the kaiser now declared the “theater of decision.” Ludendorff, as soon as he could be spared in the south, would return to Hindenburg’s staff.

  Not nearly enough had been settled, and much damage had been done. Falkenhayn’s authority had been irretrievably compromised: his subordinates had defied him and won much of what they demanded. Falkenhayn’s removal from the war ministry was in all likelihood a mistake: he had proved to be a capable administrator, doing much to prepare not only the army but the German economy for a long struggle. The kaiser too had been damaged; his credibility as a commander, never strong, was wearing thin. Wilhelm was showing increasing signs of psychological fragility. Almost completely withdrawn from the real work of planning and conducting the war, he would relieve himself of nervous energy by cutting wood for hours. Unable to sleep, he would pass his nights reading popular novels. In the end he had to beg Hindenburg to accept the new arrangement rather than resign.

  The confusion seemed boundless. At one point it was suggested that Falkenhayn should leave the army and replace Bethmann Hollweg as chancellor. Falkenhayn refused out of fear it would leave Ludendorff in effective charge of the army. Yet somehow these men were supposed to work together to s
ave their country from destruction. The prospects were not encouraging. “I can only love and hate, and I hate General Falkenhayn,” Ludendorff declared. “It is impossible for me to work together with him.” Even Hoffmann, whose temperament was far better balanced than Ludendorff’s, told his staff that Falkenhayn was “the fatherland’s evil angel.”

  But for now, for all of them, it was back to the war that was fought with guns. Conrad’s offensive began on January 23, when the forty-one divisions of a combined Austro-Hungarian and German force set out to expel forty-two Russian divisions from the Carpathians and proceed to the recovery of Galicia and the relief of Przemysl. This last objective was crucial to the Austrians both strategically and symbolically. Przemysl was the biggest, stoutest fortress in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the center from which Vienna had long dominated Galicia and its Polish-Ukrainian population. The Russian advance of 1914 had left it surrounded, with a hundred and fifty thousand troops and civilians trapped inside and running out of food and supplies. Conrad was desperate to break through before its surrender became unavoidable.

  The campaign stalled almost as soon as it began. The problem was less the Russian defenders than the nightmarish difficulties of mountain warfare in winter—the need not just to attack but to climb up ice-bound passes. There were successes, but they were more than balanced by the failures. While one Austrian army captured the city of Czernowitz and sixty thousand Russians with it, another lost eighty-nine thousand men in two weeks. The morning discovery that entire encampments had frozen to death in their sleep became commonplace. Conrad, meanwhile, remained at his headquarters far from the action—an exceptionally comfortable headquarters where the generals lived with their wives in private villas.