by G. J. Meyer
Romania chose this moment, after months of hesitation, to throw in with the Entente. This decision was taken in spite of the fact that Romania’s royal family was a junior, Catholic branch of the Hohenzollerns. It was precipitated by Brusilov’s successes, especially his occupation of the Bukovina, a Hapsburg province on the northern border of Transylvania. This little conquest, of modest importance by every other measure, mattered because the Romanians hungered to annex Transylvania, which not only included many Romanians in its mixed population but had been part of Romania until seized by the Austrians in 1868. The Romanians feared that if they failed to act now, Transylvania would fall permanently to the Russians.
On August 17 Romania signed a secret agreement under which it joined the Entente and was promised Transylvania in return. It was assured of protection from its neighbor Bulgaria (now on the side of the Central Powers and eager to recoup what it had lost in the Second Balkan War) by the army that Sarrail was bringing up from Salonika. On that same day, ironically, a mainly Bulgarian force under German General Mackenson hit Sarrail’s army at the village of Florina in Greece. Sarrail was forced into a retreat that would continue for more than three weeks. The die was cast, however.
On August 27 Romania issued a declaration of war, and that night it sent four hundred thousand troops, twenty-three divisions, through the mountain passes separating it from Transylvania. On the other side of those passes were only thirty-one thousand Austro-Hungarian soldiers. A quick and almost painless conquest seemed certain.
The addition to the Entente of Romania with its army of more than half a million men was one of those Great War triumphs that turned out to be less than met the eye—infinitely less, in this case. It was controversial before it happened, with Britain’s David Lloyd George and Russia’s General Alexeyev among those opposed. Alexeyev warned that the Romanian army was useless in spite of its size, and that Russia would find itself forced to protect hundreds of miles that had until now required no protection because of Romania’s neutrality. He argued, in short, that Russia would be worse off with Romania as an ally than if Romania stayed out of the war. The tsar ignored Alexeyev. He listened instead to Boris Stürmer, the craven, conniving, and inept courtier who (to the shock of everyone, including Petrograd’s conservative old guard) had been appointed prime minister in February and in July, after Sazonov was dismissed, had taken on the additional duties of foreign minister. Stürmer, who had absolutely no experience in such matters and was despised by nearly everyone who knew him, told Tsar Nicholas that the Romanians would sweep across Transylvania and into Hungary. He effortlessly carried the day.
Romania’s declaration of war seemed a disaster to the Germans, and for Falkenhayn it was. He had been assuring Kaiser Wilhelm that if Romania entered the war at all, it couldn’t possibly do so before late September, after the harvest was brought in. Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, who had wanted Falkenhayn’s dismissal since the two split over unrestricted submarine warfare, seemed suddenly justified. The coup de grâce was delivered when Hindenburg, prodded by Ludendorff and Hoffmann, threatened to resign if he was not made commander in chief. Kaiser Wilhelm, deeply discouraged about the state of the war and too weak politically to face down Hindenburg, gave up. On August 29 he sent a message inviting Hindenburg and Ludendorff to meet with him in Potsdam. When Falkenhayn, reading the signs, offered his resignation, it was accepted without discussion. Falkenhayn then made a final effort to save himself, warning Wilhelm that Hindenburg’s appointment would mean the end of his, the kaiser’s, ability to command the army or the nation. His power would be usurped not by Hindenburg, who scarcely mattered except as a symbol adored by the public, but by Ludendorff. Much as he resented Hindenburg and despised Ludendorff as a ruffian upstart, Wilhelm could see no alternative. The next day Hindenburg accepted Falkenhayn’s job. Falkenhayn, offered appointment as ambassador to Constantinople, asked for a military position instead. Soon—perhaps it was Ludendorff’s idea of a joke, or of ironic revenge—he was given the job of subduing Romania.
Ludendorff, explicitly given joint authority with Hindenburg over the German armies, was no longer satisfied with being chief of staff. He had the title of Quartermaster General of the German Army conferred on himself instead. He then departed by train for Verdun, taking Hindenburg with him. After getting a brief and appalling look at the situation there (the entire region was a blasted waste, its landscape described by a French aviator as like “the humid skin of a monstrous toad”), he made the inevitable official, decreeing that there would be no more German attacks.
The Romanian army, meanwhile, was showing itself to be even more hopeless than Alexeyev had warned. It was untrained and disorganized, so ill equipped that most of its divisions didn’t possess a single machine gun, with an officer corps so bizarre that its senior commanders had issued an order permitting only those above major in rank to wear makeup. The divisions entering Transylvania should, by sheer force of numbers, have been able to push the Austrians out. Instead they proceeded with excruciating slowness, waiting for Russian help that wasn’t coming. Alexeyev was disgusted by the entire enterprise, certain that Romania could not be defended, and unwilling to add to the small number of Russian troops already there.
The timidity of the Romanians in Transylvania, coupled with a period of quiet at Verdun and the Somme (where the French and British were not yet ready for their next attacks), gave the Germans precious time. Whole armies were being hurried across Hungary—fifteen hundred trainloads of men and equipment during September alone—while Mackensen, having stopped Sarrail, began shifting the bulk of his Bulgarian force northward out of Greece. Only now did the full extent of Romania’s unreadiness begin to make itself felt, turning war into low farce. Planning nothing more than a feint, Mackensen sent a smallish force to threaten the Romanian fortress of Turtukai on the Danube. The commander of this fortress, whose garrison greatly outnumbered the troops sent by Mackensen, declared boldly that “this will be our Verdun.” One day later, upon being attacked, 80 percent of the Romanians at Turtukai surrendered almost without a fight. Those who did not surrender ran away, so that three Romanian divisions essentially evaporated. Mackensen then crossed the Danube into the province of Dobruja on the edge of the Black Sea. His arrival sparked celebrations: Dobruja had been taken by Romania in the Second Balkan War, and most of its population was Bulgarian.
At almost every point where they encountered enemies, the Romanian units simply collapsed. In their haste and confusion some of them attempted to surrender to one of the few Russian units in Dobruja—their own allies, who were distinctly unamused. The local Russian commander, ordered by Alexeyev to try to organize a joint defense, replied that trying to turn the Romanians into a disciplined force was like trying to get a donkey to dance a minuet. Greece too had by this time been drawn into the Entente (temporarily, as it would turn out, and as the result of indescribably complicated political machinations), and it too was putting troops in the field. But those troops saw no more reason to fight than the Romanians did. An entire corps surrendered to Mackensen without a shot being fired and was happily sent off by train to Silesia, where it would pass the rest of the war in the safety of internment camps. When Romania’s commanders responded to the Dobruja crisis by shifting troops from the west, the only result was to thin their inert force in Transylvania.
In mid-September Falkenhayn arrived in Transylvania and took command of a new German Ninth Army, which was being assembled out of the many troops now arriving in the region. He was a man with something to prove—giving him an army to command rather than an army group had been an insult—and one day after taking up his new duties he started his forces toward the mountain passes leading to Romania. Meanwhile new convulsions erupted from France to the Caucasus. A September 15 assault by eight British divisions on the Somme included the battlefield debut of the tank. Only sixty of the new machines were in France at the time; of them only thirty-two were able to go into action, and only nine got far enough t
o help in temporarily pushing back the German line. (Ultimately the attack was another failure.) Churchill, who had wanted to keep the new weapon secret until enough could be assembled for a major surprise, was in anguish. “My poor ‘land battleships’ have been let off prematurely and on a petty scale,” he wrote. “In that idea rested one real victory.” Haig, who had insisted on not waiting, was not discouraged. He told the war office that he wanted a thousand more tanks as soon as possible. The French and the Germans got to work on tank programs of their own.
In the Caucasus Yudenich and Kemal, determined and able and well matched, struck at each other again and again, capturing towns and then having to give them up. In Greece Sarrail stopped his retreat with a counterattack against the Bulgarians and again began trying to push toward the north.
Three of the disasters of this period were particularly pointless. The Italians started the Seventh Battle of the Isonzo, which like its predecessors lasted only a few days, generated thousands of casualties, and accomplished nothing. On Brusilov’s front, Tsar Nicholas sent an elite army of Imperial Guard units that were nominally under his personal command (he didn’t go with them, however) to join in the advance on Kovel, now largely defended by Germans. The Guards, a hundred and thirty-four thousand of the best infantry and cavalry remaining to Russia, outnumbered the defenders and were better supplied with guns and shells. But their commander, a Romanov grand duke handpicked for the job by the tsar, ignored the lessons of the Brusilov offensive. Regarding flank attacks as unworthy of a force as superb as his, he sent the Guards in frontal assaults straight at the guns of the Germans. He sent them seventeen times—they found themselves trying to advance through waist-deep water while being strafed by aircraft—and every attempt ended in slaughter. Brusilov, who was not even consulted, could only read the reports and grieve. When the enterprise was called off at last, fifty-five thousand Guardsmen were casualties. As news of this disaster spread among the troops and into the civilian population, anger and resentment boiled to the surface. The heads of generals rolled, but the damage had been irretrievable.
At Verdun, which otherwise remained quiet by Verdun standards, the French on September 4 experienced a disaster that uncannily mirrored the earlier German explosion inside Fort Douaumont. In a fourteen-hundred-foot railroad tunnel that was being used by Nivelle’s troops as a barracks, communications channel, storage depot, medical treatment center, and refuge, a fire somehow broke out where rockets were being moved by mule. It spread to a chamber where grenades had been stockpiled, then to the fuel for the tunnel’s generators. It burned out of control for three days, trapping and killing more than five hundred men. The poilus too were finding reason to grumble.
September 25 brought another British thrust on the Somme. Again Haig used his tanks—only 30 percent got as far as no-man’s-land before breaking down—and as usual the Tommies paid a high price in lives for gains that included the village of Thiepval, which had been a prime objective back on July 1 and now fell at last after two days of hard fighting. Thereafter the weather failed, the onset of autumn rains making further movement impossible.
Falkenhayn, at the same time, was clearing Transylvania. Late in September he delivered a thrashing to a Romanian force at Hermannstadt. (As the name of this town indicates, Transylvania had a substantial German population, one eager to help Falkenhayn’s army with intelligence and in all other possible ways.) The Romanians fell back to the so-called Transylvanian Alps and prepared to make a stand in the passes. They were reinforced by two hundred thousand of their countrymen sent from the Danube. Their numbers, and the fact that they were on high ground protected on both sides by mountains, appeared to make them secure. Falkenhayn desperately needed to get past them and link up with Mackensen. His whole plan depended on that. But with winter approaching in the high country, time was running out. If this thrust were not to degenerate into another stalemate, he had to force the Romanians out of the passes before the snows came.
Early October brought a three-day Eighth Battle of the Isonzo, which cost many lives but otherwise had no results, and preparations for a new French attack at Verdun. On October 19, satisfied that this was not going to be another squandering of lives, Pétain allowed Nivelle to begin bombarding the Germans with six hundred and fifty pieces of artillery (among them new siege guns bigger than the German Big Berthas) and fifteen thousand tons of shells assembled for the purpose. It was February in reverse: for four days the French blasted away at demoralized German troops who, huddled under an intermittent freezing rain, saw their defenses blown apart around them. On October 22 Nivelle played a trick. Suddenly all his guns fell silent, after which, by pre-arrangement, the thousands of French troops positioned along the front line sent up a great cheer—always until now a sure sign of an attack. Thoroughly fooled, the Germans uncovered the artillery that they had kept concealed until now and opened fire, thereby disclosing their positions. This was what Nivelle had wanted. There followed not an infantry attack but another day and a half of French shelling, during which sixty-eight of the Germans’ 158 batteries were destroyed. Many of those that remained were so worn out by almost a year of heavy use as to be no longer accurate. The new French guns slowly began to break Fort Douaumont apart, setting its interior afire. The German garrison was pulled out, leaving the fort undefended.
The assault force was commanded by Mangin. When it attacked on the morning of October 24, its soldiers were concealed in mist, shielded by a creeping barrage, and thoroughly prepared. (At least partly to satisfy Pétain, a full-scale model of Douaumont had been constructed behind the French lines, and one French unit after another had captured it in mock assaults.) The attack was a total success. In one day the French retook positions on the east bank of the Meuse that the Germans had spent four and a half months and tens of thousands of men capturing. The retaking of Douaumont sparked national jubilation. When Fort Vaux fell nine days later (it too was abandoned by the Germans and captured almost without a fight), France was prepared to believe that at Verdun its army had won one of history’s great victories. Nivelle, almost overnight, became the nation’s new hero, the man who had “the formula” (so he himself declared) for turning the tide. Few wanted to notice that the Germans still held all their gains on the west bank, so that their artillery could block further advances on the other side of the river. Nor did it seem to matter that though the Germans were giving ground, they were doing so slowly and in good order. The hills retaken by the French were without strategic value, and nothing remotely like a breakthrough had been achieved. But Nivelle and Mangin were eager to strike again.
Nor was Haig quite finished (or the Italians, who on November 1 began a three-day Ninth Battle of the Isonzo that brought to almost one hundred and forty thousand the number of casualties suffered by both sides on that little front during 1916). On November 13 the British detonated a mine that their tunnelers had dug under a German redoubt on the blood-soaked ground of Beaumont-Hamel, and the subsequent attack by seven divisions captured both the redoubt and twelve hundred German soldiers. This fight went on for six days. Then on November 18 a blizzard brought it to an end. The Battle of the Somme was at an end as well. Absurdly, in their final forward plunge the British commanders had pushed their line downhill from a freshly captured ridge to the low ground beyond. The only result was that thousands of troops would, for no good reason, spend a miserable winter entrenched in cold, deep mud dominated by enemy guns.
Casualties on the Somme totaled half a million British and more than two hundred thousand French. Though the British and French originally estimated German casualties at above six hundred and fifty thousand and this number was long accepted by historians, it cannot be accurate. Official German sources place their Somme casualties at two hundred and thirty-seven thousand, a total that corresponds approximately to the calculations of Australia’s official historian. The extent to which the British and French exaggerated is clear in the various governments’ official (and credible) tabulations o
f total deaths on all sectors of the Western Front in all of 1916: one hundred and fifty thousand British, two hundred sixty-eight thousand French, and one hundred forty-three thousand German.
Whatever the numbers, many of Kitchener’s armies were now not only battle-seasoned but seriously reduced. German losses, though far from outlandish in comparison with those of their enemies, had been higher than necessary. The reason was that Fritz von Below, commander of the Second Army at the Somme, had threatened to court-martial any officer who allowed his men to withdraw and later launched hundreds of useless counterattacks. Ultimately Falkenhayn was responsible. “The first principle in position warfare,” he had decreed, “must be to yield not one foot of ground; and if it be lost to retake it by immediate counterattack, even to the use of the last man.” Ludendorff, upon making his first visit to Verdun, ordered an end to such practices and began the introduction of more flexible, less costly tactics.
Just ahead of heavy snows that might have kept them blocked all winter, Falkenhayn’s divisions now forced their way through four mountain passes. The Romanians, virtually out of ammunition, were unable to resist. Mackensen began moving toward Falkenhayn from Dobruja, which he had thoroughly subdued. The Romanian commander divided his force to strike simultaneously at Falkenhayn and Mackensen, trying to keep them apart. It was a bold move but completely beyond the capabilities of the army that attempted it. It might have had a chance of success with Russian support, and by now Alexeyev had relented. In response to the threat that Romania’s collapse was beginning to pose for Russia itself, he did what he had feared from the start that Romania’s entry into the war would force him to do. He told Brusilov to extend his line more than two hundred miles to the east and south. This ended the danger of a German move into Russia, but it so dispersed Brusilov’s troops as to render him incapable of continuing his offensive. Alexeyev was trying to send troops into Dobruja from the east, but he had acted too late in a theater that was without adequate railroads. Sarrail, meanwhile, was again trying to come to the rescue from the south. He raised hopes by capturing the city of Monastir in southern Serbia, but thereafter his advance stalled.
