by Max Hastings
During the week of fighting that followed, the German offensive ran out of steam and ammunition. The Russians were much stronger, and occupied terrain favouring the defence. Three German divisions were cut off in the wooded hills east of the city, and on 22 November the Stavka ordered sixty trains to be ready to remove an expected 50,000 prisoners to PoW camps. On the evening of the 23rd, the German corps commander Freiherr von Scheffer-Boyadel radioed his army headquarters to say that he would attempt a breakthrough that night, otherwise ‘XXV Reserve Corps will cease to exist tomorrow’. Desperate fighting followed, and next morning at 0750 Scheffer radioed again: ‘No reserves left. Situation grave,’ followed ten minutes later by ‘desperately short of ammunition and rations. Immediate assistance … requested.’ In response August Mackensen, Ninth Army’s commander, dispatched two corps to the aid of Scheffer, whose men were able to cut their way out, bringing with them 16,000 Russian prisoners. On the evening of the 24th the forces met at Bshesiny, and the Russians were denied their coup. But Ludendorff’s offensive had been a failure, for all his boasts to the contrary. While the undoubted superior of his Russian opponents in military skill, as were most of his subordinates, Hindenburg’s chief of staff was nowhere near the mastermind he considered himself.
Ruzsky, though tactically successful in driving back Mackensen, was now running short of everything. A single Russian division had expended 2.15 million small-arms rounds in just three November days. Russia started the war with 5,000 guns and reserves of five million shells. By the end of 1914, the Tsar’s factories were producing 35,000 rounds a month – but the armies at the front were sometimes using 45,000 a day. On 1 December, only 300,000 shells remained in the dumps. Beyond ammunition, the army lacked rifles and even boots, of which Ruzsky demanded half a million pairs. Carts scoured the battlefield, removing shoes from dead horses that were needed for live ones. The iron-hard ground assisted the movement of supplies, but repulsed the entrenching tools of both sides. In the deep snow, almost every wounded man froze to death before he could be evacuated. Even without the intervention of shells and bullets, some men expired from the sheer overnight cold in their trenches. Aircraft made only short flights, because pilots swiftly became incapable of moving their hands to operate the controls, though the Germans maintained nuisance bombing raids on Warsaw. Both sides experienced a steady stream of desertions. Even though the German attack had been stopped in its tracks, the Russian invasion of Germany was plainly not going to happen. Ludendorff told his masters that he had won another great victory. In truth, he had merely mauled some Russian formations, but his prestige stood sufficiently high to persuade Falkenhayn to send him four more corps from the West.
Further south, among the Austrians, after four months of hardship, defeat and deplorable leadership, morale remained low. The Hapsburg Empire’s generals waltzed better than they fought, and lacked the slightest awareness of what man-management meant. When Constantin Schneider reported to his corps commander in Cracow on 29 November, after so long in the field he was traumatised to find himself once more in civilisation: ‘it seemed as if military life stopped at the edge of the city. One felt wafted by magic away from the war. The streets were brilliantly lit up … A wholly new life that had become alien to me suddenly pulsed all around, so that I seemed translated from a dream into reality. Here were people who did not wear uniforms, pursuing tranquil activities: women in fashionable clothes; officers wearing peacetime black caps and garrison uniforms. It was strange to reflect that just two hours earlier Russian shrapnel was falling around me, in the midst of a dead zone of devastation that extended for many kilometres beyond the suburbs of this living, vital city.’ Schneider found corps headquarters established in a grand hotel. Himself filthy and wearing a threadbare uniform, he was embarrassed to mingle with washed, polished, impeccably dressed staff officers. From them he heard momentous tidings: German reinforcements had arrived, and were even then detraining. ‘This news gave everyone new hope, that victory was possible.’
In truth, the fresh forces sufficed only to prevent an absolute Austrian collapse, assisted by disarray in the Russian camp. There was renewed squabbling between the Tsar’s generals: in the south, Ivanov wanted to launch a new attack against the Austrians, but this could only happen if his neighbour protected his right flank, which Ruzsky had no interest in doing. It was left to the Austrians, instead, to attempt a new offensive early in December. This achieved some initial success, inspiring in Conrad excitement verging upon euphoria, and causing him to announce a victory. Constantin Schneider found the advance almost worse than retreat: ‘the defeated … do not see the victims of war. The victor, obliged to cross the battlefield, catches sight of them and shudders.’ He described a symbolic encounter in those days, when he came upon a Russian and an Austrian who lay where they had been striving to bayonet each other, only to be killed by the same shell. As usual, Conrad’s brief success came to nothing: he could not follow through. The Russians counter-attacked. As the year approached its end, Austrian forces found themselves once more pushed back onto the lower slopes of the Carpathians.
Both sides were pursuing incoherent strategies. Falkenhayn recognised that the war would be won or lost in the West. On 26 November he wrote to Ober Ost – the high command in Poland: ‘Any victories gained in the east at the cost of [success on] the Western Front are worthless.’ Such strictures did not deter Hindenburg and Ludendorff from maintaining insistent demands for reinforcements, and in the wake of failure at Ypres, for which Falkenhayn was deemed personally responsible, their prestige stood higher than his. Political imperatives exercised stronger influence than military ones, in persuading the Germans to send more troops east. The Central Powers were morbidly anxious that if they seemed to be losing the Eastern campaign, neutral states might throw in their lot with the allies. Berlin and Vienna were fearful that not only Italy might enter the war against them, but Bulgaria and Romania likewise. Even larger loomed the spectral consequences of an absolute Austro-Hungarian defeat. While the commanders of both Tsar Nicholas and Emperor Franz Joseph were incompetent, and their forces ill-equipped for modern war, the Hapsburg armies were in worse case. Russian troops, on their day and especially in defence, fought well; the Austrians hardly ever did. Henceforward, German activism on the Eastern Front was inspired chiefly by anxiety to keep Austria-Hungary in the war.
The Austrian army’s miserable showing reflected its institutional contempt for military science, notably including logistics. Conrad’s 1913–14 war games – the Grosse Etappenkriegsspiel – had supposedly addressed the very issues now at stake on the battlefield: deployment and supply of several army corps in Galicia. But an instructor named Theodor von Siegringen, who argued that logistics would prove a critical operational factor in a region of few roads and railways, was removed as a troublemaker. Franz Joseph’s soldiers suffered infinite hardship and grief in the winter of 1914 because their commanders refused responsibly to address their feeding and welfare. Lt. Aleksandr Trushnovich, a Slovenian, described the miserable rations issued to his soldiers – black bread, meatless stew, black coffee substitute – ‘they were almost starving’. Meanwhile he and his fellow officers ‘received more calories than the entire company – wine and cake, also cigarettes and cigars which I gave to the men. Such inequality seemed revolting, in trenches where we were all obviously equals in the face of death.’
The Austrians waged fantasy warfare. A German officer watching their troops straggle forward one day in December damned their march discipline as ‘clumsy’ – ‘hanebüchen’ – contrasted with German units in rigorous formation. It was a minor curiosity of the campaign that up to forty of Conrad’s ‘men’ in Galicia are thought to have been women. It was not uncommon in pre-war Eastern Europe for women to empower themselves by donning masculine garb and masquerading as men, and some commanding officers tolerated the presence of women in the ranks, even when their sex was revealed. One identified example was that of Polish-Viennese artist Zofia Plewi
ńska, nineteen in 1914, who enlisted under the name of Leszek Pomianowski. She was posted to the front at Lipnica Murowana in December, and thereafter served in action.
In the course of 1914, Constantin Schneider’s division, which reached the battlefield 15,000 strong, suffered twice that number of casualties, including 9,000 men missing, most of them taken prisoner. The formation’s Christmas strength fell to 4,000. Overall in the first five months of the conflict, Conrad’s armies suffered a million casualties. ‘War becomes the scourge of mankind,’ lamented Lt. Col. Theodor Zeynek, ‘not because of the human lives forfeited, but because of the collapse of moral values.’ But the ‘human lives forfeited’ seemed a sufficient cause for mourning to hundreds of thousands of families.
One December day, Aleksandr Trushnovich led a half-company of Austrian reinforcements to take up positions above the Prut river. Before dawn, in the rear areas they were fed and even given some beer. A general harangued them on their glorious role in the forthcoming battle and victory. Then they travelled for some six hours in a column of peasant carts, before taking to their feet. They found themselves traversing dense woodland, in a silence suddenly shattered by shellfire that tore branches, ‘as if a giant deer had careered past. Then there was roaring and moaning, and the noises echoed through the vaults of the forest, such a cacophony that one could not hear oneself speak.’
Reaching the edge of the trees, the bewildered soldiers glimpsed ahead the trenches they were to occupy, and dashed to embrace their shelter. But the positions were shallow and unfinished, and the Russian shelling frighteningly accurate. With frenetic energy, men worked to deepen their holes. Trushnovich risked a glance over the parapet at the grey-green ribbon of the Prut river below. Russian soldiers were visible, dashing across it under Austrian fire: ‘A Hungarian machine-gunner was firing from a breastwork ten paces from me. Missed. One could see his rounds hitting the water. Earth cascaded over me – a shell had exploded right by the parapet. I felt terribly reluctant to die.’
When the shelling finally ceased, the newly arrived Austrians were bemused to hear a deep murmur from the valley. Somebody said: ‘The Russians are praying!’ Darkness fell, broken by spasmodic exchanges of fire, flares, false alarms. At dawn, a new Russian barrage began, causing the forest above and below the Austrian line once more to crack and creak as branches broke. Trushnovich’s soldiers ‘huddled deeper into their foxholes, each one sharing his refuge with his personal God, praying to be spared’. Wounded men moaned, for no one was willing to expose himself to assist them.
As the fire intensified, ‘soon one could no longer hear anything above the roaring of the steel Bacchanalia, which drowned out cries for help. Suddenly the Russian batteries fell silent and a chorus of “Ura!” rose in the forest on the left. All went quiet, only the echo of human voices resonated … Deep in the forest we could see people whose tunics were the colour of bushes and grass. They were coming closer, dashing from one tree to the next while we advanced to meet them. Now we could clearly see their faces, and even teeth when they shouted “Ura!” There was a fog before one’s eyes: what if we had to repel a bayonet attack? … They are almost here …
‘I saw the Russians rolling forward something on wheels. My God, that’s a machine-gun! God save us from this evil! The sound of its fire burst into the discordant shouts of “Ura!” and “Hurra!”, and all around falling men began moaning and screaming in pain. I barely had time to throw myself into a shallow trench. The firing grew more and more ferocious, then suddenly died away as the [Austrian] grey uniforms began running back …’
But next day the Russians, in their turn, retired a little way. The Austrians descended cautiously to the river: ‘The smell of Russian leather and makhorka – shag tobacco – was so strong in the trenches that one knew at once who had been occupying them.’ A lot of dead lay there, with nearby a scattered heap of letters. Silence descended on the hills for a time, so that the Austrians could hear dogs barking and field kitchens arriving in the Russian lines. They imagined the invisible enemy walking about, eating, drinking. And as they listened, a man said, with a curious affectionate fellow-feeling in his words, ‘Can you hear? The Russkies have brought in their kitchens. What are they cooking up there?’ Next day, the killing resumed. Trushnovich later deserted to the Russians, in whose ranks he served for years.
On 16 December, after one of the last significant clashes of the year, at Limanowa, Theodor Zeynek rode across the battlefield:
The scene was fantastic: a maze of trenches stretching in all directions, all full of spent cases, broken rifles, bent bayonets, fragments of wood, decayed straw, groundwater, debris. There were prayer books, Austrian caps, Prussian Pickelhauben, Russian caps … Whole villages were smashed to pieces, telegraph poles cast down, bridges destroyed, groups of moaning and weeping peasants who came forward with their children because they did not know where to go; here was a heap of dead soldiers, there a row of freshly dug graves; many horse carcasses. In the villages, there were endless manifestations of devastation, most of the inhabitants deported or fled, the fields trampled, while in the skies flocks of screaming ravens cried for prey … Overhead the winter sun shone as brightly as if nothing was amiss with a world of peace and happiness.
The year ended in Galicia, as elsewhere, without decision. The German victory at Tannenberg obscured, for a season, what historian Gerhard Gross has described as ‘the strategic defeat of the Kaiserreich’ in the East in 1914. Whether or not the transfer of two corps from the West at the end of August decisively weakened Moltke’s campaign in France, the transcendent reality was that the German armies failed to achieve conclusive success on either front. While Ludendorff was an able and energetic officer, he was certainly not the genius he supposed himself. No more than any other director of war on either side could he overcome fundamental difficulties of resources, logistics, enemy mass and distances. On the Western Front, there were six rifles for every yard of front; in the East, only one for every two yards.
Russia’s forces lacked strength, and were too ill-led, to overcome the Germans. Their successes laid bare the rottenness of the Hapsburg Empire’s armies, but their own failures imposed critical strains upon those of the Romanovs. Russia’s enemies were awed by the capacity of the Tsar’s soldiers to endure suffering, but already perceptive Russians recognised the intolerable burden war was imposing upon millions of hapless imperial subjects, swept into its maw with vastly less understanding of or sympathy for the cause than most of their counterparts in the West. The Russian economy was suffering grievously from the consequences of the closure of the Dardanelles to the Empire’s shipping: Russian grain could not be exported to the West, nor vital supplies brought in. Nicholas’s people were being invited to suffer and die, so far as they themselves could see, not for any grand ideal, but merely because their emperor willed it. A government agent reported peasants saying, ‘Is not all the same, what[ever] Tsar we live under?’ They suggested that their government should pay Germany’s enemies to end the war.
Alexei Tolstoy described an NCO barking orders at peasant reservists, a tiny portion of the nine million conscripted in the war’s first year, in a lice-ridden barracks, its walls dripping with tubercular damp: ‘Right dress! Everyone at attention! Heels together, toes the width of a rifle butt apart, no gap between your knees! Heads properly straight … Then everyone can see that you are a soldier willing to give your life for your faith, the Tsar and the Motherland. You – why are you making faces? Keep your head straight!’
The man stared bitterly at the NCO and cried out, ‘I can’t, I can’t, I can’t!’
‘Why not?!’
‘I have muscle damage. I was beaten as a child!’
The NCO gave up, venting his feelings about being obliged to make soldiers of cripples. Another man began to splutter aloud, then others, in Tolstoy’s words ‘shaking with incessant wet, deep, sobbing coughs’. The sergeant shouted, ‘Why are you breeding consumption here? Silence! Keep still! Now, salu
te: the arm must move as if it was a spring, while the palm of the hand is stiff as a plank. Saluting is serious business!’ Yet Tolstoy already sensed a weariness in the soldiers’ conduct. These men were ‘unable any longer to see any beauty in military service and were merely succumbing to discipline … They have already been attacked by their first pangs of anxiety, inner doubt: “What is all this about, God help us?”’ The writer perceived men recoiling from the ‘monstrous dysfunctionality’ of their new lives, wrenched out of shape by the war, which displaced millions from their proper and familiar existences. Years of misery and slaughter lay ahead for all the combatants in the East before their rulers faced a decisive reckoning, which took place far from the battlefields.
2 THE SERBS’ LAST TRIUMPH
The Serbian front was much the least important in the big picture of the war, but it contributed mightily to the Hapsburg Empire’s descent towards collapse. There, as in Galicia and Western Europe, winter weather intensified all the combatants’ miseries. Austrian Lt. Roland Wüster recoiled from the sight of dead Serbs whose entrails had been devoured by animals. Alex Pallavicini described difficulties with his automobiles, constantly bogged in mud from which they could be extricated only by horses – a humiliation for twentieth-century technology. Repairs were difficult for lack of parts, and fuel was often in short supply. As for the Serbians, whatever the successes of their army, civilians suffered dreadfully. The assistant head of Belgrade’s psychiatric hospital, Dr Šajnović, said despairingly on 2 November: ‘If we do not get peace soon, I shall join my patients instead of treating them. I smoke like a lunatic and swill tinktura energika [a mixture of rakija and cognac], but it does nothing to give me energy any more!’ When cigarettes were no longer obtainable, some people resorted to smoking dried leaves.
