The First World War

by John Keegan

  WARFARE IN THE EAST

  The nature of these titanic battles on the Eastern Front is difficult to represent at a human or individual level. The Russian army, 80 per cent peasant when a majority of Russian peasants were still illiterate, left no literature to compare with that of the Western Front. “Personal reminiscences are very rare. Nobody collected them”; without amanuenses, the voice of the Russian peasant soldier could not speak to posterity.45 The better-educated Austrians have left equally few recollections of service in the ranks, probably because the disaster of the war was overtaken in personal experiences by the even greater upheaval of the Habsburg empire’s collapse. Intellectuals and artists—Wittgenstein, Rilke, Kokoschka—have bequeathed letters and diaries and at least one classic novel, Hasek’s The Good Soldier Svejk, which is not to be taken as representative of all Habsburg soldiers’ attitude; but they are isolated memorials. Some sense of the imperial army’s ordeal may be caught in the sombre regimental tablets in Viennese churches, still today decorated on regimental anniversaries with ribbons and wreaths. For the most part, however, the experience of the Tsar’s and Austrian Kaiser’s armies in the vast campaigns of movement in 1914 has passed out of memory. Can it be reconstructed?

  Photographs help, even if of pre-war manoeuvres; the rarer wartime photographs are more valuable still.46 All show men ranked in deep masses, often shoulder to shoulder. Perhaps they are seeking, in the German phrase, “the feel of cloth,” one way men find courage in the face of fire. Long bayonets are fixed to rifles, pouches and accoutrements encumber their movements, thick clothing bulks out their bodies. To bullets it offers no protection. Within a few months, most armies will have adopted the steel helmet, the first reversion to the use of armour since its disappearance in the seventeenth century. The opening months of the First World War marked the termination of two hundred years of a style of infantry fighting which, with decreasing logic, taught that drill and discipline was the best defence against missile weapons, however much improved. Such photographs demonstrate large-scale disobedience of tactical regulations, which in all armies laid down rules of dispersion. In the Russian army, the regulations of 1912 laid down that the lowest unit, the platoon of fifty men, should extend over a hundred paces, that is, with a yard between each soldier.47 At the same time, it prescribed a front of attack for a battalion of 500 yards, which meant that the commander should rank it in four lines of four platoons each. Since those forward would then mask the fire of those behind, it is understandable that regulations should have been discarded and the bulk of the battalion massed in the front line. Such practice obeyed, if not the letter, then the spirit of regulations, which required attacking infantry to build up a “superiority of fire” with an advanced skirmishing line, and its supports then to rush the enemy from a distance of a hundred yards or so. The Austrian army had a similar doctrine.48 The regulations of 1911 insisted that the riflemen of the infantry could “without the support of the other arms, even in inferior numbers, gain victory as long as [they] were tough and brave.” This was a view common to the continental armies, German, Austrian and Russian as well as French, the most ideological exponent of the “spirit of the offensive,” and was based not merely on affirmation but on an analysis of the nature of recent combat in, particularly, the Russo-Japanese War. It was accepted that high levels of firepower entailed high casualty rates; it was still believed that a determination to accept heavy casualties would bring victory.49

  At Tannenberg and Lemberg, therefore, we must imagine the attacking infantry moving, in dense masses, to assault enemy positions held by infantry also densely massed, if behind improvised defences, with the field artillery, deployed in the open at close range behind the firing line, delivering salvoes in direct support. In the Russian army, the 1912 regulations “prescribed that fire be delivered in short, rapid bursts, with field guns firing over the heads of advancing infantry.”50 No army had procedures, or indeed the equipment, to correct aim. Telephones were few (Samsonov’s whole army had only twenty-five) and telephone lines were almost automatically broken as soon as combat commenced; communication was by flag or hand signal, or by rumour; regulation of artillery fire was most often effected along human line of sight.51

  The 1914 battles in the Eastern Front therefore closely resembled those fought by Napoleon a hundred years earlier, as indeed did those of the Marne campaign, with the difference that infantry lay down rather than stood up to fire and that the fronts of engagement extended to widths a hundred times greater. The duration of battles extended also, from a day to a week or more. The outcomes, nevertheless, were gruesomely similar: huge casualties, both absolutely and as a proportion of numbers engaged, and dramatic results. After Borodino in 1812, a battle of almost unprecedented length and intensity, Napoleon advanced a hundred miles to Moscow; after Lemberg, Conrad retreated a hundred and fifty miles to the outskirts of Cracow.

  THE BATTLES FOR WARSAW

  The Austrian collapse on the Carpathian front precipitated one of the first great strategic crises of the war. Not only was the Hungarian half of the Austrian empire, beyond the mountain chain, threatened with invasion—the Russian generals were even jauntily discussing among themselves the capture of Budapest, Hungary’s capital—but the territory of heartland Germany suddenly lay under threat of a Russian drive into Silesia, towards the great cities of Breslau and Posen. East Prussia was not out of danger, while at the far southern end of the front, Brusilov, best of the Russian generals, was menacing the Carpathian passes. Even Moltke, worn down as he was by the evident failure of the Schlieffen Plan, could find time to turn his attention from the battle of the Aisne to the affairs of the Eastern Front, and on his last day as Chief of Staff, before his supersession by Falkenhayn on 15 September, he telephoned Ludendorff to order the formation of a new “southern” army, southern because it was to concentrate south of East Prussia, to fill the gap between the victorious Eighth Army and the crumbling Austrians. Ludendorff, who was as alarmed as Moltke by the worsening situation, made the counter-proposal that the new army incorporate most of Eighth Army’s troops, but that was a step Moltke lacked the energy to take. His successor did not hesitate. As incisive in mind as he was imposing in appearance, Falkenhayn, on 16 September, announced that most of Eighth Army would leave East Prussia to join the new army, numbered the Ninth, with Ludendorff as Chief of Staff and Hindenburg as commander; Hoffman, their operations officer during the Tannenberg battle, would join in that post. On 18 September Ludendorff motored to meet Conrad and agree with him a new plan to avert the danger under which the Austro-German front lay. The Ninth Army, instead of standing to await a Russian offensive into Silesia, would attack across the upper Vistula and drive towards Warsaw, the Russian centre of operations on the Polish front.52

  The Russians, however, had plans of their own. During September, in fact, they had too many plans, the supreme command, the Stavka, having one, and the North-Western and South-Western Fronts others. The Russian General Staff reports record “dissension between [them], resulting in different directives.”53 The North-Western Front, now commanded by Ruzski, was, by his estimation, dangerously exposed as a result of the German successes in East Prussia and must retreat a long way, perhaps as far as the River Niemen, a hundred miles east of the Masurian Lakes; if necessary, Warsaw itself must be abandoned. The South-Western Front, by contrast, wanted to press its victorious pursuit of the Austrians westward towards Cracow. The Stavka had a radical alternative: the bulk of the Russian force on the Eastern Front would disengage, concentrate around Warsaw and the great fortress of Ivangorod, upstream on the Vistula, and then launch a concerted offensive towards Silesia, with the purpose of taking the war directly into Germany.

  All these plans, though particularly those of Ruzski and the Stavka, characterise a distinctively Russian style of warmaking, that of using space rather than force as a medium of strategy. No French general would have proposed surrendering the cherished soil of his country to gain military advantage
; the German generals in East Prussia had taken the defence of its frontier to be a sacred duty. To the Russians, by contrast, inhabitants of an empire that stretched nearly 6,000 miles from the ploughland of western Poland to the ice of the Bering Straits, a hundred miles here or there was a trifle of military manoeuvre. In their wars with the Turks, the Swedes, above all with Napoleon, whole provinces had been lost, only to be regained when distance and the durability of the peasant soldier defeated the invader. As in 1812, so in 1914; to give ground now would be to repossess it later, and all to the enemy’s disadvantage. By 23 September, the Stavka had acquired clear intelligence that the German Ninth Army was concentrated in Silesia and was advancing towards Warsaw. The Grand Duke Nicholas, who had now taken control of the Stavka, accordingly decided to withdraw most of his forces from contact and await the German advance. Meanwhile, Brusilov would be left to menace the eastern Carpathians, while the Tenth Army would be despatched to mount a new offensive against East Prussia. When Hindenburg’s and Ludendorff’s Ninth Army appeared in the centre, the Russian Fourth and Ninth Armies would advance from Warsaw to oppose it, while the remainder of the Stavka’s strategic mass, Second, Fifth and First Armies, would sweep down to take it in flank.

  This was war on a titanic scale, as large in numbers committed as in the west and larger by far in terms of space and depth of movement than in any of the operations in that comparatively constricted theatre. The Russians, who were beginning to receive important reinforcements from distant Siberian military districts, successfully transferred most of their units engaged in the Carpathians to the Warsaw area in late September, without attracting the enemy’s attention; the Austrians, finding their front had been thinned out, followed, but to their eventual disadvantage. All they gained thereby was the chance to relieve the garrison of Przemysl on 9 October, soon to be surrounded again when they paid the penalty of joining the Germans in Ludendorff’s ill-conceived offensive towards Warsaw. The Stavka also enjoyed the satisfaction of watching the Russian Tenth Army return to the fray on the East Prussian frontier. Though, in the battle of Augustow (29 September–5 October), its attack was held, its intervention caused Hindenburg and Ludendorff considerable alarm. Eighth Army, overconfident after the glory of Tannenberg, had not bothered to entrench its positions and the Russians achieved some easy tactical successes before they were checked.

  By early October there were really four fronts in the east: from north to south, a German-Russian front on the eastern border of East Prussia; an Austro-German-Russian front on the Vistula; a Russian-Austrian front on the San; and a Russian-Austrian front in the eastern Carpathians. The whole extent, from the Baltic to the Romanian border, was nearly 500 miles, though with a gap of 100 miles in the north between Warsaw and East Prussia, thinly screened by cavalry. It was in the centre, however, where the Vistula flows northward from Ivangorod to Warsaw that the drama of a true war of movement, greater than any seen in Europe since the campaign of Austerlitz, was unfolding. There two complementary outflanking offensives were in motion: the German Ninth Army was marching down the west bank of the Vistula, Hindenburg and Ludendorff believing that the Russians were not in strength near Warsaw and could be encircled from the north; the Russians were preparing to cross the Vistula from the east below Ivangorod, to which the Austrians had imprudently advanced, and to march up above Warsaw, there to launch their own outflanking movement against Hindenburg and Ludendorff.

  Had the Germans had any better means of mobility than the feet of their soldiers and horses they might have pulled off the manoeuvre: Hitler’s eastern marshals, twenty-five years later, would have thought the circumstances ideal for an armoured encirclement; but the Kaiser’s generals had no such means. Worse, the Russians had superiority of numbers: from Warsaw to Przemysl they deployed fifty-five infantry divisions against thirty-one Austrian and thirteen German.54 When Ludendorff appreciated, on 18 October, that the Ninth Army was in imminent danger of defeat if he pushed it on towards Warsaw, he decided to withdraw it. Conrad, who had followed the Russians’ deliberate retreat from Przemysl to the San, was less prudent. He tried to attack towards Ivangorod on 22 October, was defeated and on 26 October was forced to retreat; Przemysl, with its garrison of 150,000 men, was left surrounded for a second time, an Austrian island in a sea of Russians, while 40,000 soldiers of Conrad’s First Army were killed, wounded or captured. The Austrians ended up near Cracow, whither they had been pushed after their defeat in the Galician battles of August, the Germans only fifty miles from Breslau in Silesia, near their starting point for the march on Warsaw.

  WINTER BATTLES IN GALICIA AND THE CARPATHIANS

  The battle of Warsaw was an undoubted Russian victory. Though it had not resulted in the encirclement the Stavka sought, it demonstrated the Russians’ superiority in the warfare of manoeuvre and even in the strategy of deception. Despite an alleged German advantage in radio interception, it was Ludendorff who had been surprised by the Russian redeployment along the Vistula from Ivangorod to Warsaw, which had been carried out with speed and in secrecy. The question remained for the Russians: what to do next? The Stavka was not in doubt. It would resume its planned offensive, delayed by the German Ninth Army’s thrust towards Warsaw, and on 2 November issued the necessary directive.55 The continuing arrival of reinforcements from the Siberian, Central Asian and Caucasian military districts supplied the necessary force. As soon as dispositions had been made, the central mass, consisting of the Second and Fifth Armies, would press forward through Breslau and Posen towards Berlin. Meanwhile the southern armies would also go over to the offensive between Cracow and Przemysl, with the aim of “completing” the destruction of the Austrian forces in Galicia and the Carpathians.56

  There were two impediments to this plan, particularly as they affected the central offensive. The first was the doubtful ability of the Russians to move their troops at the required speed to the point of encounter with the enemy. During the manoeuvre which had brought the Russian mass so skilfully to Warsaw and Ivangorod in October, the Stavka had been able to utilise the comparatively extensive rail network of central Poland. Western Poland, however, had deliberately been deprived of railways as a defensive measure; there were only four east-west lines and only two rail crossings over the Vistula.57 Moreover, during their retreat from Warsaw the previous month, the Germans had destroyed the rail network behind them for a depth of a hundred miles. The second impediment was positive rather than negative. Ludendorff was himself planning a resumption of the offensive, this time from bases further to the rear than in October, but with the same object: to take the Russians in flank in the plains of western Poland and cut them off from their Warsaw base. Making use of the undamaged rail link between Silesia and Thorn, the old fortress city standing on the Vistula at the point it entered German territory in West Prussia, he relocated thither the whole of Ninth Army by 10 November. It consisted of eleven divisions, including reinforcements brought urgently from the Western Front at the demand of Hindenburg who, on 1 November, had become Commander-in-Chief in the east.58

  Ninth Army attacked on 11 November, hitting V Siberian Corps in its over-extended and unfortified positions with a great weight of artillery. A gap of thirty miles was quickly opened between the Siberians and the rest of the army to which it belonged, Second, which had already advanced some distance towards the German frontier.59 Although the Germans were outnumbered by the Russians on this front, by twenty-four divisions to fifteen, they had the advantage and pressed on. It was only on the fourth day of their offensive, sometimes called the Second Battle of Warsaw, that the Stavka realised it had a crisis on its hands; fortunately, it recognised almost simultaneously that the situation could be saved only by precipitate retreat. It ordered a disengagement, which was carried out with great efficiency. In two days of forced march, the Russian Second Army fell back on the great cotton-weaving town of Lodz, a railway centre stuffed with supplies. It was now the Germans’ turn to be on the wrong foot. Russian outflanking forces appear
ed from north and south and three German reserve divisions were for a time surrounded.60 They were extricated with difficulty; so confident was the Stavka of collaring them that trains had been sent to Lodz to take their soldiers into captivity.

  The battle of Lodz ended on 23 November neither as a Russian defeat nor as a German victory. Ludendorff managed to represent it as a victory all the same and so extract from Falkenhayn the transfer of four German Corps from west to east, the II, III Reserve, XII and XXI Reserve, for use on the northern sector of operations as the Tenth Army; another corps, XXIV Reserve, arrived from France to join the Austrians on the southern sector. The reinforcements deployed in the north were misused. During December they were committed to a series of frontal assaults which achieved the fall of Lodz on 6 December but then petered out after an advance of some thirty miles to the rivers Rawka and Bzura, little tributaries of the Vistula south-west of Warsaw. There the terrain is excellent for offensive operations, wide, unobstructed farming land where, in 1939, the Polish army would achieve its only successful counter-attack against Hitler’s Blitzkrieg.61 It is also well-suited to defence, if troops will dig, and the Russians were excellent at digging. Confronted by their trenches, the Germans dug also, so that the coming of winter found the central sector of the Eastern Front completely immobilised. It would remain frozen, militarily as well as physically, until the following summer.