A World Undone

by G. J. Meyer

  At Verdun on May 22, “Butcher” Mangin, dreaming his dreams of glory and confident of success, opened an attack aimed at retaking Fort Douaumont. The bitterness of the struggle was becoming unnatural, almost psychotic. “Even the wounded refuse to abandon the struggle,” a French staff officer would recall. “As though possessed by devils, they fight on until they fall senseless from loss of blood. A surgeon in a front-line post told me that, in a redoubt at the south part of the fort, of 200 French dead, fully half had more than two wounds. Those he was able to treat seemed utterly insane. They kept shouting war cries and their eyes blazed, and, strangest of all, they appeared indifferent to pain. At one moment anesthetics ran out owing to the impossibility of bringing forward fresh supplies through the bombardment. Arms, even legs, were amputated without a groan, and even afterward the men seemed not to have felt the shock. They asked for a cigarette or inquired how the battle was going.”

  In the five days preceding the start of his attack, Mangin’s three hundred heavy guns had fired a thousand tons of explosives onto the quarter of a square mile centered on the fort, and the assault that followed broke into the fort’s inner chambers. The Germans regrouped, however, and after days of hellish close-quarters underground combat drove the attackers out. The failure had been so complete and the costs so high—more than fifty-five hundred troops and 130 officers killed or wounded out of twelve thousand French attackers, another thousand taken prisoner—that Mangin was relieved of command. “You did your duty and I cannot blame you,” Pétain told him resignedly. “You would not be the man you are if you had not acted in the way you did.” Meanwhile, in almost equally intense fighting nearby, the Germans were forcing their way closer to Le Mort Homme.

  By this time General Mikhail Alexeyev, still in place as the tsar’s chief of staff in spite of having been the fallen Polivanov’s partner in reform (he had survived, probably, by virtue of being at army headquarters and therefore remote from the intrigues of Petrograd), was asking his sector commanders when they could attack. Evert said predictably that he was able to do nothing. Brusilov surprised even Alexeyev by answering that his preparations were essentially complete, his four armies ready to go. It was decided that Brusilov would attack at the beginning of June. Evert, directly to his north, was coaxed into agreeing that he would send his immensely larger forces into action on June 13. He was reluctant in spite of having a million men under his command and two-thirds of Russia’s heavy artillery.

  On May 26 Joffre met with Haig, at the insistence of Pétain, and asked him to move up the date of the Somme offensive from mid-August. Haig disliked the idea, but when Joffre told him that if he waited another two and a half months “the French army could cease to exist,” he yielded.

  On May 31, for the first and last time in the war, the dreadnoughts of the British Grand Fleet and Germany’s High Seas Fleet met in battle. The German commander, having concocted a plan to lure Britain’s battle cruiser force southward away from the protection of dreadnoughts, had steamed into the North Sea the previous day with a mighty array of ships: sixteen dreadnoughts, six older battleships, five battle cruisers, eleven light cruisers, and sixty-one destroyers. Unknown to him, the British, having intercepted and decoded his radio messages, were coming at him with a hundred and fifty ships that outnumbered him in every category.

  They met near Jutland, a peninsula on the Danish coast, and what followed was the greatest sea battle in history until the Second World War. It was a complex and confused affair, unfolding in five distinct stages as the fleets separated and converged and changed directions again and again, and it was marked by serious mistakes and much ingenuity on both sides.

  The Germans lost one battleship, one battle cruiser, four light cruisers, five destroyers, and twenty-five hundred men before withdrawing to home ports from which they would never again venture.

  The British losses were heavier: three battle cruisers, three cruisers, and eight destroyers, sixty-two hundred men. Technically the battle was a draw, and strategically it changed nothing. The British had been outgunned and outmaneuvered. Though the public was told of a glorious victory, and British fleet commander John Jellicoe was celebrated as a hero, the Admiralty knew better.

  At about the same time the Germans took possession of Le Mort Homme at last, eliminating the artillery threat from that quarter. Now they were free to shift over to the defensive on the west bank and start the climactic east bank offensive that was going, according to Knobelsdorf, to carry them into Verdun. By June 1, with the main force for the new offensive still being put in place, German units making an exploratory attack fought their way up to the final approaches to Fort Vaux. This fortress, smaller than Douaumont but formidable nevertheless, was now the last major strongpoint standing between the Germans and the city. Everything needed for the capture of Verdun appeared to be falling into place.

  One blow after another was falling on the Entente. The Austrians were out of the Alps and on open ground. They appeared to be positioned to encircle the Italians retreating before them. In Flanders the Germans captured a piece of high ground called Mont Sorel two and a half miles south of the heaps of broken stone that once had been the beautiful city of Ypres.

  But then it was June 4, and Brusilov ordered his guns to open fire. Brusilov’s preparations had been imaginative and aggressive, with everything focused on taking the Austrians by surprise across such a broad front that they would find it impossible to react effectively. His use of air and ground reconnaissance to identify enemy weak points was without precedent in Russian military operations, and his efforts to deceive the Austrians had gone so far as to include the painting of phantom trenches on the ground behind his lines. His barrage lasted only one day, its purpose not to obliterate the Austrians’ defenses but to neutralize their artillery and clear away their barbed wire. It did both things. His infantry, when it attacked on June 5, found the Austrians in confusion. Its advance stunned them with its scope, extending as it did along a line of more than two hundred and fifty miles. Brusilov’s idea was that by attacking everywhere, he was sure to find holes somewhere, and he had moved his reserves (scant though they were) close enough to the front that they could exploit opportunities as soon as any appeared. On point after point—the brevity of his bombardment, his refusal even in the face of appeals from Alexeyev to mass his troops on a narrow piece of the front, his willingness to attack forces equal to his own in numbers—he ignored what had become by now the tactical orthodoxy of the Great War. And the result was, from the first hour, a success of almost incredible magnitude. The Austro-Hungarian Fourth Army disintegrated when hit; seventy-one thousand of its men, more than half of the army were killed, wounded, or captured. The Seventh was wrecked even more completely, losing one hundred and thirty-three thousand men. It was the same almost everywhere; after three days Brusilov found himself in possession of three hundred thousand prisoners. Before the end of the first week, more than half of the Austrian defenders had become casualties.

  The remnants (most of them Slavs, the more trusted Austrian units having been sent off to Italy) fled back toward the Carpathians. They were incapable of restoring their lines both because they had no reserves—what could have been their reserve force was south of the Alps—and because their senior commanders were absent. They were at a Hapsburg castle in the faraway town of Teschen, partying with Conrad.

  June 4 was, by what turned out to be a singular stroke of bad luck for the Austrians, the birthday of the nonentity who was titular commander in chief of all the Austro-Hungarian armies. This was Archduke Frederick, a nephew of Emperor Franz Joseph and one of the several Hapsburg grandees holding ceremonial posts in the upper reaches of the army. A great celebration had been arranged in honor of the occasion, and Conrad, confident that the impending conquest of Italy would give the empire and its dynasty much to celebrate, had attended not only with senior members of his own staff but also with generals from Galicia. The festivities were still in progress when word arrived t
hat the Russians had suddenly become active on their southern front. Conrad serenely assured all present that there was no reason for concern.

  It did not take long for him to learn otherwise. Two days after the party the Italian commander in chief, General Cadorna, used troops taken from his fifth (and brief and unsuccessful) Isonzo offensive to counterattack the Austrians who had descended out of the Trentino. He was successful this time and Conrad’s Italian campaign came to its end. In Galicia, Brusilov had shattered the Austro-Hungarian forces on his flanks and was positioned to encircle the center. Only one thing was stopping him: he lacked the necessary manpower. Many times the number of troops needed to do the job were with Evert in the northwest, but Evert remained unwilling either to attack or to let go of any of his divisions. June 13, the day on which Evert had pledged himself to an attack, came and went without action. This was a mortal failure. Max Hoffmann wrote afterward that if Evert had attacked, “the crisis would probably have developed into the complete defeat of the Austro-Hungarian Army.” Instead, the Germans opposite Evert’s army group remained unengaged and free to shift southward against Brusilov.

  General Luigi Cadorna (right)

  Launched attack after attack at River Isonzo.

  Even without Evert’s assistance, a conclusive defeat of Austria-Hungary seemed inevitable. Conrad, thoroughly alarmed, hurried by train not to the front but to Berlin, where he reported the end of his Italian adventure and begged Falkenhayn for help. Falkenhayn responded even more coldly than usual, promising nothing. But the German Army of the South was still in Galicia, and now it hit the Russian Eighth Army at exactly the point where the Brusilov offensive was achieving its deepest penetration. Brusilov, his troops exhausted and the Russian supply system failing him in its usual fashion, had to halt to regroup.

  He had achieved tremendous things. He had destroyed two Austro-Hungarian armies and all but wrecked others, delivering a deeply damaging blow to the shaky morale of Vienna’s armies. His hordes of prisoners included thousands of officers, and he had captured hundreds of machine guns and pieces of artillery. The ground taken by his troops was not crucially important when measured against the vastness of the eastern theater, but with his enemies in such disarray he faced rich opportunities for further conquest. He had redeemed every pledge that Russia had ever made to its allies. If he had not stopped the Austro-Hungarian descent upon Italy—Cadorna had seen to that—he had made certain that the Austrians could not reinforce the Trentino campaign.

  No less important was the sense of confidence that he had restored to the armies of the tsar. “This town today is a veritable maelstrom of war,” a British correspondent wrote of the entry of Brusilov’s troops into newly conquered Lutsk. “From not many miles away, by night and day, comes an almost uninterrupted roar of heavy gunfire, and all day long the main street is filled with the rumble and clatter of caissons, guns, and transports going forward on one side, while on the other side is an unending line of empty caissons returning, mingled with wounded coming back in every conceivable form of vehicle, and in among these at breakneck speed dart motorcycles carrying dispatches from the front. The weather is dry and hot, and the lines of the road are visible for miles by the clouds of dust from the plodding feet of the soldiery and the transport. As the retreat from Warsaw was a review of the Russian armies in reverse, so is Lutsk today a similar spectacle of the Muscovite armies advancing; but now all filled with high hopes and their morale is at the highest pitch.”

  Perhaps most important of all, Brusilov had suddenly and terribly complicated Falkenhayn’s manpower problems at a point when the Germans seemed once again on the brink of forcing their way into Verdun. Knowing that an Entente offensive on the Somme was drawing near, Falkenhayn had been planning a preemptive attack. Now, thanks to Brusilov, that plan had to be abandoned. As scornful as he was of Conrad, as reluctant as he was to use scarce resources to pull Conrad’s chestnuts out of a fire that Conrad himself had made possible, Falkenhayn had no choice but to start transferring troops—eighteen divisions, ultimately—away from the Western Front.

  But Brusilov too was in a difficult position. He had paid a great price for his victory: three hundred thousand men lost, huge stores of ammunition expended, and other supplies depleted to the point of exhaustion. And Brusilov, more than any of his enemies, more even than the Austro-Hungarians, lacked any hope of making good his losses. With the war ministry in the hands of an inoffensive but superannuated general whose only qualification was his unquestioning loyalty to the Romanov family, the Russian military administration was barely functioning except for the benefit of profiteers. In a real sense Russia’s collapse and the revolution that followed stemmed directly from Petrograd’s inability to resupply Brusilov and from Evert’s failure to give him support. Balancing the Russian calamity was Ludendorff’s refusal to send troops from his base in the north to help either Falkenhayn at Verdun or Conrad in Galicia. It can be said in Ludendorff’s defense that he continued to be faced with Russian armies that outnumbered his and had to be expected to attack.

  As events on four fronts—Verdun, the Somme, Galicia, and Italy—began to interlock, the strain was intense everywhere. The Italian government fell as controversy erupted over Cadorna’s handling of the Trentino offensive. For the first time in the war the French National Assembly was forced to meet in secret session, the opposition demanding answers about Joffre’s strategy.

  The whole month of June was a time of terrible and sometimes weird events. The British were shocked to learn that a cruiser bound for Russia had struck a mine near the coast of Scotland, and that among those lost was Earl Kitchener of Khartoum. The ever-amazing Conrad, many of his armies barely functional, proposed to an incredulous Falkenhayn a giant offensive aimed at surrounding and destroying Brusilov’s army group. He was not just ignored but laughed at; even his Austrian colleagues were learning to despise him. And as if there were not enough active fronts already, an Arab revolt was breaking out with British support in the desert wastes at the southern end of the Ottoman Empire, while at Salonika French General Sarrail was nearly ready to take his force northward into the Balkans.

  Fort Vaux, the all-but-final obstacle on the Germans’ long and bloody road down the east bank of the Meuse to Verdun, surrendered after days of bitter and brutal combat. Its defense had been so heroic that the French commander, who had given up at last only because his men were literally dying of thirst, was honored personally by the crown prince, who gave him a sword to replace one lost in the fight. The captive Major Raynal returned the favor by noting that young Wilhelm Hohenzollern was “not the monkey that our caricaturists have made him out to be.” The fall of Fort Vaux left only one final small strongpoint, Fort Souville, between the Germans and the city. It cleared the way for the climactic offensive that Knobelsdorf had been hungering for since April.

  The last of Falkenhayn’s reserves went into this attack: thirty thousand men on a front of just three miles against an objective that, if taken, would leave them only two and a half miles from the central citadel at Verdun. Knobelsdorf was so confident of success that he invited the kaiser to join him. June 22 was reserved for the artillery barrage, which was as savage as ever and ended with the firing of shells containing a new kind of gas, phosgene, that killed every living thing, even plants and insects. “Our heads are buzzing, we have had enough,” a French lieutenant somehow was able to write in his journal while this attack was in process. “Myself, Agnel, and my orderly are squashed in a hole, protecting ourselves from splinters with our packs. Numb and dazed, without saying a word, and with our hearts pounding, we await the shell that will destroy us. The wounded are increasing in numbers around us. These poor devils not knowing where to go come to us, believing that they will be helped. What can we do? There are clouds of smoke, the air is unbreathable. There’s death everywhere. At our feet, the wounded groan in a pool of blood; two of them, more seriously hit are breathing their last. One, a machine-gunner, has been blinded, with one e
ye hanging out of its socket and the other torn out: in addition he has lost a leg. The second has no face, an arm blown off, and a horrible wound in the stomach. Moaning and suffering atrociously one begs me, ‘Lieutenant, don’t let me die. Lieutenant, I’m suffering, help me.’ The other, perhaps more gravely wounded and nearer death, implores me to kill him with these words, ‘Lieutenant, if you don’t want to, give me your revolver!’ Frightful, terrible moments, while the cannons harry us and we are splattered with mud and earth by the shells. For hours, these groans and supplications continue until, at 6 P.M., they die before our eyes without anyone being able to help them.”

  The infantry attacked at five A.M. on June 23, breaking through the center of the French lines. Pétain, learning of this, decided that in order to save hundreds of artillery pieces from capture he was going to have to abandon the east bank. Trenches were being dug, and barricades erected, in the streets of Verdun.

  But the Germans were paying the price of advancing on a narrow front: they were exposed to murderous fire on both flanks while aircraft strafed them from above. The forward edge of the advance got to within twelve hundred yards of the crest of the last ridge before Verdun, but that was as far as it could go. At the end of two days of horror for the men on both sides, the Germans had to give up. This failure too came down to a shortage of troops. Just days before, faced with telegram after telegram detailing the emergency in the southeast, Falkenhayn had decided that he had no choice but to begin pulling divisions out of Verdun and getting them onto trains bound for Galicia. Just one of those divisions, if thrown into the final lunge at Souville, might have swung the balance. That no division was available has to be considered part of Brusilov’s achievement.

  The French, at the climax, had appeared to have no chance of holding on. Joffre’s view of the situation is clear in his decision to dispatch to Verdun four of the divisions he had been saving for the Somme. Everywhere there was panic and an almost frenzied shuttling of troops. Conrad ordered the transfer of eight divisions from Italy to Galicia, and a desperate Aristide Briand, Premier of France, traveled to Haig’s headquarters to beg him to begin his offensive on the Somme. He must have been powerfully persuasive: Haig began his bombardment that afternoon. Pétain, when he telephoned Joffre to report that he was removing his artillery from the east bank, was told of the start of action on the Somme and ordered to stand fast. He did so, and with what must have seemed miraculous speed the pressure lifted.