Grey Tide In The East

by Andrew J. Heller

  The Austrians reached the ruins of the fort after sustaining light casualties, and entered with bayonets fixed. Dawson decided that he needed to get a closer look. The Russians were no longer shooting anywhere near him, as the attack had moved east to the heights over the San River. He tapped Fox on the shoulder, pointed at the fortress, and said, “Come on, Ed. Let’s go down there.”

  The two men emerged from the shell hole, and moved quickly but cautiously nearer to the fighting.

  By the time they had reached the nearest part of the fort, he could hear the sharp report of rifles, the screams of wounded men and shouted orders of officers and sergeants. He judged that they had come close enough, and motioned for Fox to crouch with him behind a jagged four-foot piece of concrete that had been blasted from the walls of the works. They were able to see inside the fortress through an archway that had once supported a roof but now stood topless. From here they could clearly see a platoon of Austrian infantrymen working their way through the ruins of the fort.

  Suddenly, he heard a rattle of a machine gun. Straight ahead, perhaps forty feet away and directly in the camera’s eye, an Austrian soldier suddenly dropped his rifle, doubled over and toppled slowly to the ground. Dawson held the camera steady on the unfortunate man, recording the kicking legs, flailing arms and twitches of the head that were either the last signs of life or the first ones of its departure. He continued to hold the shot until all movement had ceased. He wondered momentarily about the man whose death he had just filmed, whether he had left a family behind, what kind of soldier he had been and what kind of man.

  By nightfall the fighting was over. The fortress had fallen to the Austrians, and Dawson had completed his filming. After all the footage was compiled and edited, The Battle and Fall of Przemysl would be complete and Dawson’s reputation would be assured. He wondered whether the film would make him famous, and what fame would be like. If the movie was as successful as he hoped, he was going to find out.

  Chapter Fourteen: IN THE VOSGES MOUNTAINS, ALSACE, APRIL 10, 1915

  Lieutenant Charles de Gaulle, with his back to a granite outcropping facing down the slope of the mountain on which he currently sat, looked back the way he and his platoon had come. He considered himself lucky to be alive and uninjured. Most of his men had not been as fortunate as he. To his left and down slope, the stubby figure of his Platoon Sergeant Georges Gruyer lay face down, unmoving. Georges’ rifle lay a metre in front of him, where his last convulsive movement had thrown it after he caught a machine gun bullet in the chest.

  Below and on either side, de Gaulle could see other members of his platoon lying on the rocky slope in all the varied poses of death: some on their backs; some face-down like Georges; one whose head had been torn off, probably by a chunk of shrapnel; and another whose head and chest had been separated from his lower body. The Lieutenant guessed that there were now probably fewer than ten men left alive and unwounded in his platoon out of the original forty-five that had gone into the battle two days before.

  They had attacked three times in three days, rushing up the slope, yelling fiercely (to frighten the waiting boches; de Gaulle could picture them trembling with fear in their concrete revetments), charging German positions on the side of the thickly forested mountain with the élan that made the Thirty-Third Regiment one of the famous fighting units of the Army. They discovered what de Gaulle and very few of the other French officers already understood (not one of whom was on the General Staff): élan, guts, courage, the spirit of the offensive, call it what you will, could not overcome machine-gun bullets, nor was it protection from the shells that rained down by modern rapid-fire artillery.

  Appropriately enough, it had been one of General Joffre’s classmates at Ecole Polytechnique who had been the source of the disease that had eventually infected the entire French military establishment: the Doctrine of the Offensive. In the late 1880s, Captain Georges Gilbert began to preach that the only reason for France’s defeat in 1870 was the defensive mindset that allowed the Prussians to take the initiative. His idea, that the all-out attack was the solution to all military problems, the so-called “furia francaise,” became by the late 1890s the basis for what passed for thought at the Ecole de Guerre, the training ground for France’s future military leaders.

  Gilbert’s chief disciple, who elaborated his concepts into what eventually became official doctrine, was Ferdinand Foch. Foch quickly became the most popular instructor at the War Academy, teaching that battle is a struggle between wills, only lost when one side believes itself beaten. What was unforgivable to de Gaulle was that Foch was fully aware of the capabilities of modern rifled small arms, machine guns and rapid-firing steel artillery, but discounted them, insisting that all of these innovations favoured the bold attacker, who could “march straight onto the goal and finish the contest by means of cold steel, superior courage, and will.”

  In his books (de Gaulle had been impressed when read them as a cadet at Saint Cyr), Foch had sensibly insisted on the equal importance of flexibility, security and economy of force. In Conduct of War and Principles of War Foch warned that a commander could destroy the “will to conquer” by attacking the enemy where he was strong rather than where he was weak, that élan would not overcome the effects of recklessness or poor planning. These caveats were missing from his lectures, however.

  Worse still, after Foch left the Ecole de Guerre to take a field command, he did nothing to correct the dangerously abridged versions of his teachings that were propounded by his favourite pupil and protégé, Louis de Grandmaison. In Grandmaison’s hands, Foch’s ideas were simplified to the point of inanity, if not insanity. His book was filled with things like “Charge the enemy in order to destroy him… all other conceptions should be rejected as contrary to the very nature of war.” Foch’s emphasis on planning, preparation, security was shrugged off: “Imprudence is the best security… [victory] can be obtained only at the price of bloody sacrifice.” De Gaulle had only to look at the still forms of his men on the Alsatian hillside to confirm the last part of that statement at least.

  This kind of talk was red meat for Grandmaison’s auditors, the future leaders of the French Army. In 1911, when Joffre, an enthusiastic and uncritical proponent of Grandmaison’s theories, succeeded to the post of commander-in-chief, the offensive a’ outrance became the gospel for the French Army. The result was a series of new tactical field manuals for infantry and artillery, reflecting the new verities: attack was everything, defence nothing. Any officer who dared to openly disagree with this doctrine suddenly found his prospects for advancement stunted or shattered altogether.

  Oddly enough, Grandmaison, Foch and Joffre had studied the effects of the combination of trenches, barbed wire, machine guns and exploding shrapnel artillery shells in the Russo-Japanese War. Grandmaison had even been an observer in Siberia in 1905 and had seen the carnage wreaked by the new weapons for himself. But, since the evidence did not support the theory of the offensive, it was dismissed as irrelevant. Grandmaison and the others concluded that the Japanese and Russian infantry in those conflicts were so deficient in courage compared to the poilu that the examples they provided were meaningless.

  A few, like de Gaulle, saw things otherwise. The chauvinistic assumption that Frenchmen were braver than all other nationalities was to his mind, ludicrous. A man charging a machine gun nest over open ground was a man who would soon be a casualty: how brave he was had nothing to do with it. His first commanding officer, Colonel Petain (Brigadier-General Petain now, de Gaulle mentally corrected himself), understood the importance of firepower. Why didn’t the General Staff?

  Along with the new tactical doctrine came new, lower estimates of the size of the German Army, based not on new information but on wishful thinking. All previous intelligence indicating that the German Army was substantially bigger than the French was disregarded, replaced by new estimates that gave the French equality or even superiority. These new assumptions swept away any excuse to retain the pre
-1911 plan to stand on the defensive, with the bulk of the army positioned in the north to meet the expected German sweep through Belgium. Possessing the bravest soldiers in the world, and with numbers on her side, how could France refrain from attacking the cowardly boches?

  Then there was political pressure. Under the terms of the military convention of the Franco-Russian Treaty of 1894, the Tsar was secretly pledged to launch an attack on East Prussia at the outset of the war, even before Russia had completed her mobilisation. To obtain this promise, with its attendant risks for Russia, French premier Raymond Poincare felt obliged to promise that his country’s armies would launch an immediate offensive in turn.

  Out of these elements was born the ruinous Plan XVII in 1913. Since having the weight of the German invasion come through Belgium was inconvenient for Plan XVII, it was now assumed that the bulk of the enemy army would be concentrated along the frontier in Alsace-Lorraine. Then, if the Germans, who were outnumbered according to the new estimates, did try a wide swing through Belgium with their right wing, the French thrust through their centre would certainly break through the German lines, ending in the rear of the attackers. And, if by some strange turn of events the offensive in Lorraine did not accomplish the dislocation of the German offensive through Belgium (not that they really were coming that way), then the British Expeditionary Force fighting alongside the four corps of infantry of the French Fifth Army on the left wing would be more than enough to handle anything from that quarter.

  The combination of a strategic plan that was largely based on wishful thinking and a tactical scheme that ignored the effects of modern weapons produced a catastrophe in the Battles of the Frontier, as might be expected. But what was arguably worse still, these bloody repulses did not lessen the high command’s faith in the offensive a’ outrance.

  It must have required a great effort of will not to see the futility of the approach after the August battles, de Gaulle thought. And that was inexcusable. French assaults in these same mountains were cut to pieces by the heavy boche artillery and the prepared defences, which seemed to feature a German machine gun nest behind every rock and fallen tree. Even the massacres of the summer (the official casualty figure was 110,000, but de Gaulle had heard that the true number, kept back to preserve civilian morale, was closer to 250,000), did not register at the top, although the fighting men could see what was happening clearly enough.

  And so, de Gaulle’s platoon, the whole Thirty-Third Regiment, and hundreds of thousands more brave poilus had to be sacrificed to demonstrate that one cannot overcome a machine that fires five hundred bullets a minute at a range of two kilometres with nothing more than unprotected human bodies and courage.

  Although he had seen only a small part of the whole, de Gaulle had little doubt that this new offensive would prove to be as much of a blood-drenched abortion as the Battle of the Frontiers had been. The French Army had hurled its men at a well-prepared enemy, in terrain almost designed for the defender, with a bare equality or inferiority of numbers, inferiority in firepower, and an idiotic tactical doctrine. It was hard to imagine any other result.

  Looked at in purely objective terms, excessive courage was actually a military vice under such conditions: the braver the men were, the more likely it was that they would be killed to absolutely no purpose and thus be unavailable when they were needed. That was how de Gaulle’s platoon had been reduced to its current skeleton. The fighting spirit of the Thirty-Third had led them to take insane risks, and they had paid the price.

  De Gaulle heard the rattling of a machine gun off in the distance, and then an echoing cry of pain. He decided that he had waited under this boulder for new orders for quite long enough. He peeked carefully around a rock outcropping, then scuttled, bent almost double, down the slope and back to company headquarters to see if there was a job for him, new orders, or news about how the rest of the Regiment was faring. Any of those things was preferable to spending more time hiding behind a rock.

  Chapter Fifteen: TALLINN, ESTONIA, APRIL 22, 1915

  The speeches and celebrations had gone on all day, and judging by the happy roars that continued to pour into the little café off the Raekoja Square, they seemed likely to continue throughout the night.

  Ray Swing excused himself from the table he was sharing with his companion, and went to peek out the door when the crowd roared especially loudly to see what had happened. He could not detect the source of the momentary swell in excitement, so he shrugged and returned to his seat.

  A huge crowd of Estonians filled the Square to overflowing. They sang patriotic songs, danced, waved the new blue, black and white flag of the Republic (where did they get all those flags? he wondered. Estonian independence had just been declared that morning) and guzzled bottles of liquor. From time to time, the crowd settled down for a few minutes to listen to one of their local politicians deliver a speech from one of the big windows set high up in the massive 13th century Gothic-style Town Hall overlooking the Square. But as soon as a speaker would finish (and sometimes when he merely paused to take a deep breath), the merry mob resumed its rowdy, raucous, joyous celebration.

  “Quite a party, isn’t it?” asked Swing’s tablemate, almost shouting to make herself heard over the happy clamour. She was a tall, pretty blonde named Emma Olsen, whom Swing had met the previous day. Emma was a buyer, travelling for her father, an importer in New York City where she also lived when she was in the States. She had come to Estonia to try to make a deal with L. Knoop and Company who owned a mill on Krenholm Island near Narva. The Krenholm Mill, Emma explained to Swing, was the largest textile mill in the world, and the quality of the clothing produced there was excellent.

  Swing had met Emma when he stopped in Tallinn to file some stories. He had hoped to file them earlier but had not had a chance until the rapid German advance up the Baltic coast had paused for a few days to allow their supply train to catch up. He found that Emma was not merely decorative but was also very knowledgeable, had a sharp, inquiring mind and was fascinated by what he had seen as a reporter travelling with the German Army in the East.

  “Why not?” he shouted back. After all, it was their Independence Day. Estonia was, as of this moment at any rate, an independent, sovereign nation. “They might as well enjoy their independence now,” he said. “I don’t think it’s going to last very long.”

  She frowned thoughtfully, and then said, “Oh, you mean because of what happened in Latvia and Lithuania?”

  He nodded. In the course of his journey with the advancing grey tide of the German Army, Swing had seen similar foredoomed independence celebrations before. He had also seen the outcomes.

  In Lithuania, the first Baltic State to be “liberated” by the Germans, a Revolutionary Council met in the capital Vilnius three days after the Tsar’s administrators had pulled out with the last Russian troops. The Council was offered a draft Act of Independence by a representative of the German Foreign Ministry. Under the terms of this Act, Lithuania would be formally declared independent of Russia, but would request a “special relationship” with Germany, in essence becoming a German client state. The Council debated the German draft, and then rejected it, producing instead a Proclamation of Independence, declaring Lithuania to be a free and sovereign State.

  The next day, a company of German soldiers interrupted the deliberations of the Council, which was then engaged in forming an interim government in the Vilnius Town Hall. The 15 members of the Council were taken out of the hall at bayonet point and placed under arrest. An interim government in the form of a military governor appointed by the Foreign Office in Berlin took over the reins of administration in Lithuania.

  In Latvia, the story was much the same. There were wild celebrations in the streets when the Latvians learned that the Russian oppressors had fled before the advancing German Army. Leaders of the Latvian independence movement had been anticipating and preparing for the Russian exodus. The People’s Council of Latvia assembled in Riga even as the last of th
e Russian Army units was leaving the capital, and quickly passed a Declaration of Independence. They also passed a temporary Constitution, which called for free elections to a Constituent Assembly to write a permanent Constitution, with elections to be held within 30 days. Finally, they selected an interim government from among themselves. Since the People’s Council had thoughtfully prepared the various Declarations, Constitutions and ministerial lists and had selected themselves for seats on the Council in advance, they were thus able to accomplish a great deal in a remarkably short time.

  Unfortunately for the People’s Council, all their work was in vain. In Riga, as in Vilnius, soldiers in feldgrau quickly appeared to disband the interim government, cancel the elections and install an administrator chosen by Berlin. Latvian independence, like that of Lithuania, proved to have the lifespan of a mayfly.

  Swing had little doubt that the same thing would soon happen here in Estonia. Kaiser Wilhelm had not sent a million soldiers all this way to free the suffering Baltic peoples from Tsarist oppression; they had come to win a war, and incidentally expand the borders of the German Empire as much as possible.

  The German tide had washed up as far as the Gulf of Riga before being brought to a halt by the harsh Russian winter. With the spring thaw, it had resumed its advance. Swing had been travelling with Hausen’s Third Army since the opening of the German spring offensive, back at the beginning of April.