by Max Hastings
At Austrian headquarters, Alexander Pallavicini sought to look on the bright side, consoling himself with the thought that the army had escaped terminal disaster: ‘No news except of small encounters along the front … Looking at the different war theatres there is no reason to get depressed: the French, British and indeed Russians have suffered considerable setbacks, not to mention Belgium. And for the present we have halted die Russische Dampfwalze – the Russian steamroller. But because nowhere has anything happened to our decisive advantage, this killing and destruction will last for a long time before the angel of peace descends.’
If death was equally terrible in every theatre, the plight of wounded men was even worse in eastern conditions than in the west. Rocking, creaking country carts pulled by broken-down horses crept from the battlefield towards the rear, laden with broken and often dying men, prostrate on beds of bloody straw; of the three customarily carried in each vehicle, it was unusual for two to reach dressing stations alive; fewer still survived further. Alexei Ksyunin listened to a Russian casualty conversing entirely amicably to a Hapsburg prisoner, also wounded, on the same cart.
‘Hungarian?’
‘No – Slovak.’
‘Have a lot of you surrendered?’
‘Oh yes, a lot, and a lot are killed … We had fun in the first days, but after that not at all. There was no food … Bread had run out and tins as well, they only gave us coffee twice.’
The Slovak told the Russian that he had left a wife and two children in the Carpathians. In the usual placatory fashion of prisoners, he praised the Russians and called them a kind, good people.
‘Tell me, sirs, what have we been fighting for? I don’t know why they sent us to fight our own people.’
Lublin hospital presented a ghastly spectacle – more than 2,500 wounded crammed into three hundred bedspaces. Men lay on floors, in halls and corridors and kitchens, many of them untended because medical supplies were temporarily exhausted, as were doctors and nurses. One man shrieked an agonised protest about a passer-by: ‘Take him away! He is stepping on us, putting his boots on us!’ A soldier hit in the head, now stone-blind, groped down a corridor, touching the wall. Another man with a head wound clung to a stove, his eyes bleary and lifeless, until an officer passed. Reflexively, he struggled to his feet to salute.
A warehouse by Lublin station became an overflow for casualties denied space in the hospital. Polish nurses stepped gingerly among the prostrate, bloody, groaning throng, distributing cigarettes. A Russian gestured to his Austrian neighbour and said to a girl, ‘Give him one. He’s one of us. Speaks our language. He could be a Ukrainian.’ The anecdote is credible, because in Galicia more than any other theatre of war, the subjects of the two warring emperors felt a bond of kinship in their shared predicament, shackled to a conflict beyond their comprehension or sympathy, under the orders of rival gold-braided buffoons. At a hospital in Warsaw, correspondent Sergei Kondurashkin asked a wounded soldier why so many of the inmates had been hit in the arms. The man replied with bitter sarcasm: because those hit in the head had been obliged to remain on the battlefield. The journalist wrote: ‘One hears dozens of stories but they are all the same, just as the soldiers themselves are the same, and the circumstances in which thousands and tens of thousands of men have found themselves in battle.’
As Aleksei Tolstoy travelled from Moscow towards the front, at first he marvelled at the continuing normalcy of rural life behind the war zone, observing from his train: ‘There were the same idle people at the stations, the unaltered tranquillity of villages and farmsteads … a peasant driving his oxen along the railway, herds raising clouds of dust at sunset …’ But much bleaker sights and sounds shattered this idyllic view as he approached the battlefield. Southbound rail traffic, including Tolstoy’s own train, was constantly interrupted to allow the passage in the opposite direction of Russian wounded being taken to Moscow, in open wagons exposed to the elements. Tolstoy noticed that many were wearing Austrian blue serge tunics and boots – of better quality than anything issued by the Tsar’s army.
Almost every soldier taken prisoner experiences a surge of shock and confusion, the realisation that this is a life-changing moment, together with the onset of bottomless uncertainty about the future. Ivan Kuznetsov described his sentiments as he found himself in Austrian hands: ‘I thought of my village Lipyagi, my parents, my young wife and child. They are going to have a hard time without me. What is going to happen to me?’ Many PoWs died on both sides of the Eastern Front. Russian prisoners transported across Hungary in freight cars were attacked at wayside stations by local people throwing stones and banging sticks against the cars’ sides to show their hostility.
Several thousand Russian prisoners were held in appalling conditions at a camp near the Hungarian town of Estergom, where many died from starvation. Ivan Kuznetsov recorded:
We awoke to see dead men lying here and there, who had to be buried at once. Several times … we assembled to demand food … approaching the guards and shouting: ‘Khleba! Khle – ba!’ [Bread! Bread!] The guards hit us with their rifle butts and drove us back into the barracks … Some fifteen corpses remained lying on the ground. Sometimes bosses would come to the camp and give us a strict warning, and for a few days we got more bread and they made potato soup for us. But then the food went downhill again. Prisoners stuck together in regional groups, me with others from the Penza area … Two were relations … Our greatcoats had been taken away, so we slept on the ground wearing our tunics and trousers. They gave us 200–300 grams of bread every three or four days. Food was cooked once a day, boiled water with a little wheat flour and red ground pepper added, one bucket for every twenty men. Autumn came with its cold, damp and mud. We started digging ourselves into the earth like moles. The soil was sandy, soft, so we were able to dig a hole quickly, and then to make a niche so that several men could lie there. There were three men in our group, and we crawled into the hole and lay there under the arching sandy ceiling. We got up in the morning all covered in sand, shook it off ourselves, washed and walked around the camp all day, and in the night we got back into the hole. It became even colder in October, and our improvised bunkers collapsed.
On the other side, the Austrian army’s miseries continued without respite. ‘You want to dig in because of the shellfire,’ wrote Edler Hoefft, ‘but it is no fun amidst huge pools of water. Then came such a torrential downpour that I was soaked below the waist, my boots squelching at every step. Entrenching becomes much too tiring if you do not stay long in one place, and thus I ducked it, rather apathetically.’ In those cold autumn Polish days, cranes flew over the battlefields wailing mournfully, while many villages were abandoned by their inhabitants, indiscriminately fearful of the passage of either army. Marching men, horses and carts, spilling over from the narrow roads, carved new thoroughfares across fields of potatoes, beet, carrots.
Sergei Kondurashkin wrote: ‘One saw groups of refugees from villages near the Vistula in the empty fields and in the valleys. They have taken all that they could carry on their shoulders and trudge with their families. They don’t know where they are going. They sit down in a cold, wet valley to rest and consider what to do next. They try to warm their children. One man chews a dry breadcrust between jaws stiff with cold and misery. It takes him a long time to swallow it and reply to the question I put to him: “How is it in Annopol?” “Oh, sir, like death! The Rushinovitz house was destroyed yesterday. A shell hit it and the house collapsed. The owner was wounded and his wife killed. A soldier was also killed. Maevich, Burak, two cows, Anton Petz, Godzhikovsky were all killed. Almost everyone else has left. Those who haven’t will go today.”’ Both sides conducted relentless searches for enemy agents, most of whom existed only in their imaginations, but nonetheless costing many innocent civilians their lives. In Przemyśl, Richard Stenitzer described often hearing firing at 6 a.m. on the fortress’s rifle range, ‘where alleged spies are shot’. Constantin Schneider recoiled from the incessant wi
tch-hunts, describing how military police entered a village ‘from which shots had been allegedly heard, and recklessly shot all suspicious-looking people’.
Russian troops continued to skirmish inside the border of East Prussia, and their paranoia about suspected francs-tireurs prompted spasms of savagery. The small town of Domnau was burnt by the invaders after they were fired on by German troops, and deluded themselves they had been attacked by townspeople. The same happened in Aschwangen, where forty people were executed after shots were fired at passing Russian cars. But a post-war German official account notes with scrupulous fairness: ‘With only few exceptions, Russian officers attempted to prevent acts of violence.’ In most communities the Russians conducted themselves with moderation, and sought to ensure that local civilians were fed. Indeed, the 1914 Russian invasion of East Prussia – in striking contrast to that which took place thirty years later – was generally characterised by humanity and restraint.
The most notable German grievance was that during the Russians’ later retreat, they removed some civilians as hostages – the number is disputed, but may have been in the thousands – and held them for the rest of the war. The Russians reoccupied some East Prussian border communities from which they had retreated after defeat at the Masurian Lakes, one of them Popowen. The activities of looters, predatory patrols and casual arsonists finally persuaded the Sczuka family that they must leave their home there and flee westward, into German-held territory. On 14 September, escorted by a Russian soldier, they walked to the local headquarters at Grajewo to seek the necessary permission. At first they were warmly received and presented with small jars of honey. But then the Russians told them they must be detained overnight. The following evening, they learned that they were to be transported deep into Russia – one family among several hundreds swept away to become hostages. They remained until 1918 in Siberia, latterly held in a prisoner-of-war camp, and then amid the chaos of Russia’s civil war were unable to return to their homeland for two years thereafter.
Further south, Alexei Ksyunin visited Austrian prisoners, of whom an apparently endless procession marched through Lublin: ‘First there were files of Slovaks in bluish uniforms, then they were replaced by Hungarians in dark-blue jackets. One glimpsed PoWs as soon as one woke up and looked out of the window. Going out of town one saw once again a long column of them. Back in the hotel at nightfall, once again there were the silhouettes of Austrians, like dark spots.’ Both sides’ spirits had fallen low. Searching for a likely billet one evening, Constantin Schneider’s unit chanced upon an abandoned country mansion. Smashing locks, they entered the dining room to find dirty glasses and plates on the table, where the house’s owners had sat with Russian officers a few hours earlier. The soldiers looted everything worth taking, then wrecked the furniture. ‘In enemy country, moral restraints cease to exist,’ wrote Schneider uncomfortably. Yet, on the following day when the unit came under heavy Russian artillery fire, their colonel refused to allow the destruction of a giant wooden cross that was providing the enemy with an obvious aiming-point, on grounds of religious scruple.
While in the west in September 1914 the rival fronts congealed, a process completed in October, in the immense expanses of the east a war of movement continued. In a world of few roads and fewer railways, large forces moved only as fast as could a marching man. When rain and mud descended, that pace became slow indeed. Distances were so vast that neither side could maintain continuous lines, as in France and Flanders – the front was almost twice the length. Densities of troops were about a third of those in the west.
The Hapsburg army was now recognised by both sides as the sick man of the conflict, requiring constant German assistance merely to keep his feet. The Russians were committed to simultaneous efforts to finish off the Austrians, and to reverse the outcome of their disastrous August campaign in East Prussia. If intelligence was indifferent in the west, it was worse in Galicia. Each side misinterpreted the other’s actions, or responded sluggishly to its initiatives. Russian commanders maintained incessant rivalries with each other. In mid-September in the south, Ivanov sought to keep pressing the retreating Austrians, aiming to take Przemyśl then Cracow, and afterwards push for Budapest.
Meanwhile on the other side, the Germans now saw no choice save to respond to Conrad’s plight. Falkenhayn and the Kaiser were appalled at the prospect of a wholesale Austrian collapse. They rushed eastwards reinforcements of four corps, which enabled Hindenburg and Ludendorff to ride to the rescue of their allies. This new Ninth Army deployed on the eastern border of Germany north of Cracow, where it immediately threatened the Russians’ right flank. The Russian response, at the end of September, was to concentrate thirty divisions against Hindenburg. With this force, commanded by Ivanov, they hoped not merely to defeat Ninth Army, but also to launch an invasion of Germany from the middle Vistula towards the upper Oder. The Vistula initiative prompted a renewed clash of Russian commanders’ egos. Ruzsky, nettled by perceived slights from his superiors, determined to pursue his own offensive into East Prussia – yet another reckless diversion of effort. Twenty-five Russian divisions embarked on this operation, while thirty more remained pinned down in Galicia, facing the Austrians.
At the beginning of October, Ivanov decided to regroup forces for his invasion. This required withdrawing them across the San, then moving them up the east bank of the Vistula to safe crossing points. During this three-week manoeuvre, the Russians marched interminably, and fought not at all. On 9 October, when the Germans captured the Russian order of battle from a fallen officer, they realised that their own eighteen exhausted divisions now faced sixty, and that they had no chance of a decisive victory. The Germans and Austrians thus confined themselves to following up the Russian columns. Ludendorff trumpeted a victory, merely because his own forces went forward while those of the enemy went back.
Ivanov, in the best Tsarist style, contrived to inflict grievous damage on his own army even without fighting anybody. On the interminable marches, horses died in thousands for want of fodder; men suffered terribly in relentless rain. When at last the troops reached their designated Vistula crossing points, they lacked supplies and adequate bridging equipment. They were obliged to halt, and for days merely gaze upon the mighty flow. By the time they began to cross on 11 October, the Germans and Austrians were ready for them: Ivanov’s men who reached the western bank remained penned in small bridgeheads. A pontoon bridge broke loose in a flood and drifted downstream to the suburbs of Warsaw, where it remained. By mid-October it was plain that the Vistula crossing, and thus Ivanov’s invasion of Germany, was going nowhere.
The border zones of Russian Poland lapsed into anarchy as the armies ebbed and flowed across the region. Russian officials prudently retired to Warsaw. Gendarmes changed into civilian clothes to escape unwelcome attention from either side. At Otwock railway station just one such officer remained, fortified with liberal infusions of vodka, to extract a one-rouble personal ‘tax’ from every passing passenger. In the city of Włocławek, which the Germans occupied for three weeks, order was maintained among the population by local firemen carrying sabres. When the Germans retreated, the firemen carried on as policemen, as they did in Lubień and Kowal. The Russian army had never trained its officers to assume any civic responsibilities, and thus where local government broke down, civilians suffered chronic misrule.
A Tsarist officer, Mikhail Lemke, wrote wearily from general headquarters about his commanders’ indifference to the plight of their fellow citizens: ‘they go on blindly, lacking the slightest inkling about the life of the country’. A vigorous black market evolved not merely in food and alcohol, but also in uniforms, boots, overcoats and even weapons, most of these garnered by traders scavenging battlefields. Men routinely sold personal equipment – even their precious winter clothing – to buy food.
If all soldiers in all wars find their knowledge largely restricted to events within their own line of sight, the remoteness of Galicia and Poland imposed a
special isolation and ignorance. War correspondent Sergei Kondurashkin walked into a big country house near the Vistula, now the headquarters of a cavalry regiment, to be greeted by a barrage of familiar questions from officers desperate for tidings from foreign fields: ‘How are things in France?’ ‘What is Rumania doing?’ ‘Turkey?’ ‘Where have the Germans got to?’ Kondurashkin wrote: ‘I had not imagined that I was privy to so much interesting information. I tried to recall details of all the developments in the world, possibilities, opinions and conversations.’
It was now the turn of the Germans to make their own move. They advanced into Poland in appalling weather, along roads deep in mud. Even as Ninth Army marched, Ludendorff’s nerve weakened. He concluded that his forces were too small to have a real chance of taking Warsaw, and on 20 October ordered a withdrawal. Once again, both sides had overreached themselves. A few thousand more men had perished, for no significant advantage to either.
The Polish city of Łódź had difficulty deciding whether it was at war or at peace. The cafés were thronged with both civilian and military customers, undeterred by spasmodic incoming shells. One of these hit the best hotel, the Victoria, entering through the roof, smashing through a top-floor ceiling and floor, then departing through a side wall, mercifully without inflicting casualties. Alexei Ksyunin was gossiping with a fellow war correspondent, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, founder of the Moscow Art Theatre, when a shell fragment shattered the glass top of the next table to their own. The rest of the clientele remained unmoved by such a trifle; they were soon listening to an intrepid aviator describing how his plane had come down in no man’s land, forcing him to spend several hours in a swamp under shellfire before darkness enabled him to creep back to the Russian lines.
