Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War

by Max Hastings

  In the Austrian lines Conrad crowed, claiming a great victory. But the Russians were bringing forward reinforcements, and their supply line was now shorter than that of the Austrians. Even as Conrad’s northern armies launched their advance into Russian Poland, south of Lemberg between the 26th and 28th they also attacked the much larger Russian army on the river Złota Lipa; this time, it was the Austrians’ turn to suffer a defeat as costly as that which Ivanov’s army had incurred further north. Near Chochłów, at a divisional staff meeting a comrade of Constantin Schneider pointed to a cloud overhead. The officer suggested fancifully that its shape resembled a back view of Bismarck’s head. ‘It was as if he, the creator of the Triple Alliance who had always opposed war with Russia, was now turning his back on us.’ On the 29th and 30th, in the south the Austrians attacked again – and were badly beaten. Franz Joseph’s regiments advanced in masses with little artillery support, and were rewarded with crippling losses.

  Yet Conrad the fantasist persuaded himself that apparent success in the north made defeat in the south unimportant. He conceived a complex plan to allow the Russians in the southern sector to advance further, then swing his northern armies to attack their flank. He became especially excited by news of Tannenberg, which reached him at this time: anything Germans could do, Austrians must match. Through the first week of September, both sides’ forces blundered across Galicia, their men exhausted by interminable marching even before they began to fight. Ruzsky occupied the abandoned Austrian fortress of Lemberg on the 3rd, but then during the days that followed was worsted in several brushes with the enemy.

  Conrad’s most serious folly was to ignore the fact that the Russians were heavily reinforcing in the north, while he prepared his intended Napoleonic masterstroke in the south. By 1 September, some thirty-five Russian divisions faced twenty Austrian ones. These bore down upon Conrad’s positions south of Lublin with irresistible force, and even found sufficient spare troops to make a lunge towards a corps of German reservists deployed east of the Vistula, screening the Kaiser’s territories. This force fell back in disarray across the river, having lost 8,000 men – it deserves notice that the Russians, in the first two years of the war, captured more German prisoners than the British and French armies put together. Though the humiliation of defeat at Tannenberg, and soon also at the Masurian Lakes, lay heavy upon the Russian army, in Poland in September its fortunes suddenly soared.

  A few miles behind the front, the city of Lublin was in a fever of excitement. Crowds clustered outside the cathedral to examine artillery pieces captured from the Austrians, their shields – one inscribed Ultima Ratio Regis, the other Pro Gloria Patriae – pockmarked with bullet-holes. A young Russian gunner proudly showed off to ignorant civilians how they worked, giving himself imaginary orders, loading make-believe shells, pulling the trigger lanyard and shouting ‘Fire!’ Clouds of dust raised by thousands of tramping boots swirled above the streets. At the railway station soldiers lay curled in huddles, sleeping with their rifles beside them and their caps tipped over their eyes. ‘Even at two or three in the morning,’ wrote an eyewitness, ‘the city is unable to quiet itself, streets thronged with people excited and anxious after the victory.’ He watched a crowd of Austrian prisoners being escorted through the streets, most gazing fixedly at their feet rather than at their surroundings, unwilling to meet the eyes of local people.

  Overwhelming Russian pressure on the enemy’s flanks began to tell: in action after action, Conrad’s exhausted formations were worsted and obliged to fall back. The mood in the Austrian camp was profoundly gloomy: a soldier, Pàl Kelemen, watched from nearby Halicz as fugitives fled the fortress of Lemberg:

  The population was pouring out of the city in long columns. On carts, on foot, horseback. Everyone making shift to save himself. All of them carrying away what they can, and exhaustion, dust, sweat, panic on every face, terrible dejection, pain and suffering. Their eyes are frightened, their movements craven: ghastly terror oppresses them. As if the dust cloud they stirred up had bound itself to them and could waft them away. I lie sleepless by the roadside and watch the infernal kaleidoscope. There are even military wagons muddled into it, while across the fields march routed infantry, lost cavalry. Not a man of them still carries his full equipment. The exhausted throng pours through the valley. They are running back to Stanislau.

  The fall of Lemberg, fourth largest city in the Hapsburg Empire, represented a serious humiliation, and Austrian troubles persisted through the days that followed: many guns were lost, including some simply abandoned by crews to speed their own flight. On the night of the 8th, Conrad’s officers, contemplating their filthy, exhausted and dispirited men, recognised that the army was beaten. Next day, Russian forces advanced on them from north, east and west. The Austrians’ only avenue of escape lay southwards, and they took it. ‘With a stab of awareness, a painful sense of failure, our column crossed the border once more, its dreams of victory shattered,’ wrote Constantin Schneider.

  Desperate days followed. Rüdiger Freiherr Stillfried von Rathenitz was an eighteen-year-old platoon commander in a Feldjäger battalion, ordered to launch a counter-attack near Magierów at dawn on 10 September. His men lost patience with lying at a forest edge under fierce Russian artillery fire, waiting for the order to advance. Somebody shouted ‘Vorwärts!’ – ‘Come on!’ The Austrians sprang to their feet and ran forward across open ground under the barrage, Rathenitz following them and struggling in vain to curb their exuberance: ‘I wanted to check this mad dash, but my shouting went unheeded – no orders could be given.’ Absurdly, as the men ran, some held their spades protectively in front of their faces. Then they took cover again, and began to dig in. Rathenitz himself had barely started scraping when he felt a slap in his right foot, followed by a fierce pain in the upper leg. He knew he had been hit.

  He was obliged to lie in the open for the next fifteen hours, until darkness fell, because no stretcher-bearer would brave the fire sweeping the area. He was solaced by the company of a soldier who helped him to dig in: ‘At midday it got unbearably hot; we were dreadfully tormented by thirst.’ His comrade found a piece of stale bread which they shared, before rolling a cigarette from toilet paper and pipe tobacco. At 9.30 that evening, at last they were carried to the rear. After a ghastly journey on a cart, among a column of such vehicles whose passengers sustained ‘ceaseless moans and groaning’, he reached Przemyśl. From there he was taken by train to Vienna, where he remained hospitalised for weeks.

  On 11 September Conrad ordered a general retreat. Constantin Schneider was sent to ride through the dark night to beg help from the neighbouring division to plug a dangerous gap in the line. On his way, he met a shattered battalion that had lost 90 per cent of its strength, whose commander was grateful to be told where he was. When Schneider delivered his appeal for succour, the divisional commander dismissed it at once, shrugging that he was himself too short of men to spare any reinforcements. The staff officer’s long ride had been in vain. Schneider returned to his own headquarters oppressed by the peril facing the army. The Tsar’s generals continued to pour in reinforcements, while Conrad’s numbers shrank and his men wilted under the strain of constant marching. By 9 September the Russians were pushing forward relentlessly, threatening the Austrians with absolute disaster. Conrad appealed to the Germans for assistance. The Kaiser, with his forces in the midst of their crisis retreat from the Marne, responded that nothing could immediately be done.

  The Russians’ successes owed much more to Austrian blundering than to their own generalship or prowess, but Conrad’s humiliation was incontestable. This seemed the less palatable in contrast to German triumphs elsewhere. Alexander Pallavicini described the sour response to news of Tannenberg among his comrades of the army staff. They grumbled: ‘Always the Prussians and not us.’ Pallavicini responded that ‘this should not matter, so long as the victories are there’. The others still dissented, but he stuck to his guns, venturing boldly: ‘It would be better
to put everything under German command.’ This was not well received. ‘I do not make myself popular by saying such things.’ He added two days later: ‘The Germans’ success seems ever greater. They must have a secret formula – die müssen ein geheimes Kraut haben. In our circumstances this is hard to take, but one should not forget that we face the bulk and cream of the Russian army.’ The Tsar’s subjects in Galicia’s frontier areas rejoiced as the invaders were driven back. Stanislav Kunitsky, a landowner, had sent his children away to Lublin when the Austrians overran his estate, then spent thirty-six hours hiding in the cellar of his mansion with his wife while battle raged around them. Once liberated – for a time – by Cossacks, he invited their officers to a feast dominated by ‘a fabulous cabbage soup’ and a giant carp from his pond. While the Kunitsky garden remained scarred with shell craters, the table was adorned with autumn asters.

  Millions of peasant soldiers’ ignorance of technology yielded moments of comedy. A Russian explained to a correspondent how he won a medal: ‘Well sir, I was on the road and saw an automobile coming towards me … driven by a man in a German hat. I stepped aside and started shooting. I hit the vehicle and it stopped. I ran forward and shot the fellow who was in it. I thought then of taking it to headquarters. I got into the driver’s seat and tried to make it move, but I couldn’t. The vehicle was puffing, but it wouldn’t go. Then I saw a peasant with a cart. I made him unharness it, and [use his horse to] pull away the automobile.’ Soldiers gaped at the first primitive Russian armoured cars, deployed in action near Łódź. One man contemplating a steel-plated monster observed gravely: ‘a serious thing’. A correspondent wrote of the cars: ‘They are welcome guests, everywhere invited to make a long stay.’

  British military attaché Alfred Knox, who was following the Russian advance, one night witnessed the interrogation of some Austrian PoWs. He was fascinated by their captors’ lingering attachment to chivalry: ‘It was an unforgettable scene, the room crowded with officers, a single flickering candle, and the prisoners. Only NCOs and a few of the men are questioned … the Russian theory being that the officer is a man of honour and must not be insulted by being pressed to give information against his own country.’ In the same spirit later, when the Russians were obliged to withdraw behind the Dunajec river, an Austrian divisional staff took over a castle at Radłów previously occupied by a Russian corps commander. The new occupants were undisturbed by gunfire, because the Russian general promised the castle’s owner, Count Henryk Dolański, that in recognition of his own month’s tenancy, he would spare it from the attentions of his artillery.

  The Austrian line of retreat was strewn with abandoned weapons, vehicles and equipment, together with the usual dead and dying horses. Stragglers crowded into the fortress of Przemyśl, where the garrison was strengthening the fortifications in readiness for another siege. On 12 September, traffic in Przemyśl ground to a halt amid the chaos. By the 17th, the Russians had moved within artillery range, and began firing into the city. Fears grew in Vienna that the enemy might break through to the Danube: 30,000 workers were dispatched to build defences, though in some sectors the only available artillery dated from 1875 and even 1861.

  There was a striking contrast between the condition of officers and men in the Austrian ranks. Inside Przemyśl, Dr Richard Stenitzer wrote in his diary on 24 September: ‘We pass the time by playing cards, eating and sleeping! In the evening we had a feast in Lieutenant Karara’s dugout with several wines and champagne.’ He described himself, without irony, as having little work save the care of cholera cases, some of whom later carried the disease to Vienna. Yet during the same period, the war diary of an infantry regiment recorded its ghastly three-week retreat, with the men utterly exhausted, and an order issued: ‘Keep marching heedless of stragglers and without halts.’ The unit was obliged to cover painful extra miles to bypass Przemyśl, to avoid worsening its chaos of broken units and wrecked vehicles.

  The city was very late in starting to stock provisions against a siege. Almost half its 714 guns were nineteenth-century black-powder pieces; when these were fired, many stockpiled shells were found to be duds. Hasty preparations for defence were made, including construction of new outworks, erection of a million yards of barbed wire, clearance of fields of fire. But nearby trees remained unfelled, so that when the Russians closed in, they were able to exploit the woodland to screen their advance. It was all very Hapsburg: the Austrians had always been determined to hold Przemyśl, but their accustomed lethargy precluded the adoption of active steps to achieve this until the enemy was at the gates. The fortress was besieged for the first time from 26 September to 10 October, when it fell to the Russians, whose occupation lasted several weeks before they were obliged once more to fall back.

  Under the stress of defeats, Conrad’s discordant, multi-ethnic army became ever more fragmented. Units recruited from the east proved especially unreliable. The 19th Landsturm Infantry, for instance, was composed of so-called Ruthenes, mostly Ukrainian. The regiment collapsed during one of the August battles, its men throwing away their weapons and equipment as they fled. In September, the rump of this regiment was expelled from Przemyśl’s garrison, deemed too unreliable to defend a sector.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein was among the crew of the Austrian picket boat Goplana on the Vistula, who abandoned their vessel in the face of the headlong enemy advance. ‘The Russians are right at our heels,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘… Haven’t slept for 30 hours.’ Next day, the crew reboarded the boat, but only in order to retire to Cracow by way of the Dunajec river. Behind Przemyśl, Austrian discipline and morale revived a little as Conrad’s troops fell back across their own territory, having broken contact with the enemy. Constantin Schneider noted: ‘Men’s behaviour improves from one day to the next. They shoulder their weapons according to orders and don’t drag them along the ground or carry them like sportsmen. Marauding along the roadside has stopped, and even horses are not herded mindlessly together.’

  By mid-September the Austrians had retreated to the rivers east of Cracow, having lost more than 350,000 men. The Russians had suffered a quarter of a million casualties, but could draw upon much deeper reserves of manpower. Among vast quantities of war matériel left behind by the Austrians were a thousand rail locomotives and 15,000 wagons. They were woefully short of tractors and horses, so that some 120mm gun batteries now relied on oxen for mobility. Yet Constantin Schneider observed wonderingly that the campaign had demonstrated an undreamt-of technological revolution in war-making, ‘more profound than in the entire period between Napoleon and Moltke’.

  Conrad’s only course now was to dig in where he stood, and await German assistance. From France, Henry Wilson wrote to his wife Cessie on 19 September: ‘the campaign [in the west] will be over in the spring, that is to say if the Russians do moderately well, and I know of no reason why they shouldn’t’. His remarks emphasised persistent British and French faith in Russian might, even after the disasters at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes, the scale of which was imperfectly grasped in London and Paris. In the conflict of 1914–18, as later in that of 1941–45, it was a source of dismay and frustration to the Western allies that the Russians were obsessively secretive about their operations, and especially about their defeats. Britain’s New Statesman on 17 October acknowledged the shroud of mystery enfolding events in the east, as far as the outside world was concerned. It conceded that ‘the battle which is now in progress may last a very long time, possibly even for weeks … We shall be wise to discount for the present any news of “great victories”, from whichever side it comes.’

  In the Hapsburg camp, Conrad confessed dryly to his staff that if the Archduke Franz Ferdinand were still alive, he would have had the architect of this appalling military disaster – himself – taken out and shot. ‘The Austrians’ predicament looks pretty bad,’ German colonel Max Hoffmann wrote in his diary on 26 September, ‘which shows the dire consequences of neglecting to spend any money on the army for 20 years.’
Around a third of Conrad’s formations were shattered. But the laggardly Russian pursuit spared the Austrians from conclusive catastrophe. Ivanov elected for a pause, to enable his armies to regroup and resupply, and to fortify Lemberg against a counter-attack.

  It was characteristic of the war on the Eastern Front that logistics halted each side’s advances in turn. The Russian and Austrian commissariats were alike feeble, and the descent of autumn rain churned unmetalled roads into quagmires. The Russians had much larger armies in Galicia than they could properly supply, in a region of few railways. Everything was short save men: soldiers wandered battlefields with sacks, collecting shoes from dead horses. Sergei Kondurashkin heard a soldier under fire shout to all and sundry from a peasant cottage, ‘Come and eat! I’ve boiled some potatoes, and God knows when our proper rations will turn up.’ A trickle of men risked the Austrian shelling to make a dash for the cottage to share the bounty.

  The wretched lot of the Tsar’s soldiers was only slightly alleviated by deliveries of comforts sent from St Petersburg – cigarettes, bagels and cakes in small pink bags adorned with lace. In some units it became necessary to provide with rifles only men in the forward trenches. Those in the second line had to wait for weapons to become available when their comrades were killed: Vasily Mishnin, a former furniture salesman from central Russia, recoiled in horror when handed a rifle matted with dried blood. Inside Lublin post office in mid-October rose a mountain of mail sacks, thirty-two tons of them, letters for hundreds of thousands of soldiers desperate for news from home. They could not be delivered because the chief postal officer lacked carts to take them forward.