The Beauty and the Sorrow (52 page)

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This operation, just like the British offensive on the Somme, ultimately came in response to a plea for help from hard-pressed allies: the French were under pressure at Verdun, the Italians at Asiago. When Brusilov agreed to the pleas of his superiors and offered to mount a general offensive, asking for no more than very modest reinforcements, some of his colleagues shook their heads in dismay. Madness, they thought: everyone knew (didn’t they?) that mounting an offensive demands massive superiority in terms of numbers, control of the air, millions of shells and so on.

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In reality, battles were less a competition between the trenches and machine guns of the defenders and the assault units and artillery of the attackers than a pitting of the defenders’ reserve units (which could be moved quickly to threatened sectors by train) against the slow forward push of the attackers’ advance units, whose artillery trailed behind and frequently encountered enormous problems in advancing across a landscape that it had only just (and usually very successfully) blown to pieces.

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It helped, of course, that Brusilov was attacking the Austro-Hungarian army, which by this stage was suffering from an “almost Spanish-Hapsburg combination of serenity and incompetence” (to quote Norman Stone). There is also the fact that the railway network was considerably less developed and troop density much lower than on the Western Front. (This also explains why the war in the east was, in general, much more mobile than in the west.) Many of the Central Powers’ divisions had spent much of their time on trains, being shunted from one threatened point to another by irresolute commanders; Lobanov-Rostovsky himself had been in this situation during the previous year’s February offensive. Moreover, many of the German and Austro-Hungarian units that arrived were exhausted and well below strength after having been pulled out of the witches’ brew of Verdun or from the harsh plateau around Asiago.

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The name “tank” has its roots in an attempt to deceive. The project was, of course, top-secret and anyone who asked was told that these big vehicles were “water tanks” to transport water to the troops. The latter part of the description stuck.

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A few examples from this period. An article with the headline “We Are Not Beaten” is stopped, as is another article that reports that around 50,000 Frenchmen have been killed in the war so far. A suggestion that the Allies have most to win by prolonging the war is also banned; a report pointing to the deaths of a large number of small children during the war in Romania likewise. Any detailed discussion of German peace feelers is forbidden. Only the most extreme and nationalistic German newspapers are quoted, the aim being to suggest that these offer a picture of German opinion in general. The official British documentary film of the Battle of the Somme, which has just arrived in France, has scenes cut out—including the most famous in which a group of soldiers is seen storming out of a trench and one of them falls back dead. (It is perhaps worth mentioning that this scene was probably staged.)

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Or possibly a day or so earlier.

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Front-line soldiers of all nationalities felt a mixture of disgust and hatred for the trench rats because they lived on the corpses, and they lived well, growing unusually large. Two indicators of how long a body had been dead were putrefaction and rat damage. The two processes were in competition and it was often the rats that won.

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Money was of no interest to the local population: they already had more than enough of the worthless German emergency paper currency.

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Ian Gately has shown that there were increasing restrictions in Europe on tobacco smoking before 1914, but that the war undermined this change of attitude. Vast quantities of tobacco were consumed in the war years and tobacco was part of a soldier’s basic rations right from the start. British soldiers received two ounces of tobacco a week whereas the Germans were given two cigarettes or cigars a day. (The British navy received a ration double that of the army and if the same was true of the German navy it would explain why Stumpf suffered so much.) Tobacco in one form or another was a standard item in parcels sent by the aid organisations and by relations. The French soldiers’ newspaper
La Baïonette
, for example, in addition to expressing constant nagging concerns about shortages, published paeans to tobacco at regular intervals. The popularity of smoking was probably due to a combination of factors. The mildly narcotic effect of the nicotine, along with the fact that it gave the men something to do in stressful situations, would undoubtedly have helped calm the nerves of many. At least as important for those in command of the armies, anyway, was the fact that tobacco suppresses appetite. A third factor was that the smoke helped to mask the stench of putrefaction: it was not unknown for units in trenches particularly affected by rotting corpses to be given extra rations of tobacco.

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U-53 had been all the way to the United States and even docked at Rhode Island harbour (the United States was still neutral at this stage). The purpose of the voyage had been to act as escort to the enormous ocean-going merchant U-boat
Bremen
, which had been sent to the United States to bring back strategic raw materials. After the
Bremen
mysteriously disappeared during her maiden Atlantic voyage, U-53 simply returned home, torpedoing five vessels on the way. The German navy had seven huge merchant U-boats of the
Bremen
’s class (U-151), designed to ensure the supply of vital goods. The recognition of the effectiveness of submarines during the war led Germany to construct a range of U-boats as well as the standard type: UB-boats were designed to attack in coastal waters and UC- and UE-boats were small vessels designed mainly for mine laying in coastal and ocean waters, respectively.

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See 30 September 1915,
this page
.

1917

And the savage in you makes you adore it with its squalor and wastefulness and danger and strife and glorious noise. You feel that, after all, this is what men were intended for rather than to sit in easy chairs with a cigarette and whiskey, the evening paper or the best-seller, and to pretend that such a veneer means civilization and that there is no barbarian behind your starched and studded shirt front.

HARVEY CUSHING

Chronology 1917

THURSDAY
, 4
JANUARY
1917
Angus Buchanan attends the burial of his company commander at Beho Beho

In the beginning it looks like yet another failed pincer movement. The 25th Royal Fusiliers—or, to be more accurate, the 200 men remaining of the original 1,200—have been on their feet since before dawn. They have the reputation of being the most reliable and fast moving of the British units and they have once again been sent on in advance to carry out an encirclement. Their target, and that of the main force, is the village of Beho Beho. While the other units approach the hamlet from the east, Buchanan and his companions are to move round stealthily and approach from the west, preventing the German unit known to be in the village from slipping away in its usual manner. Sunshine. A baking sky. The scent of hot foliage.

After two hours of cautious marching through the bush they reach the position in which they intend to wait for the retreating enemy. There is a small road in front of them, leading from the village. The sound of sustained gunfire hangs in the hot air: the main force has started its attack. The men of the 25th Royal Fusiliers spread out in a long, extended line, lie down in the cool cover of the shade provided by the trees and wait. The sounds of battle in the distance show no sign of easing off and after a while the men begin to feel some impatience. Is this yet another operation that has come to nothing?

That is the story of the operations in German East Africa. The British columns have moved in a series of clumsy leaps from valley to valley,
slowly pushing the mobile, elusive companies of Schutztruppen southwards. They will soon be at the Rufiji river.

On paper this looks like success and most of the German colony is now in Allied hands. But this has happened only at enormous cost in terms of suffering and resources. The war has also affected this part of Africa in a way no other conflict has done. Before it is all over the British alone will have recruited a million black bearers (virtually all the stores are carried on African backs for part of the journey), one in five of whom will not survive the war.

What the Allied commanders under the leadership of Smuts have failed to understand is that von Lettow-Vorbeck, their tough, intelligent and cynical opponent, does not give a damn about the colony. Right from the start, this master of guerrilla warfare has seen it as his task to draw in as many enemy troops as possible, because every man, every gun, every bullet shipped to East Africa means one man, one gun, one bullet fewer on the Western Front. And the German has succeeded in this beyond his wildest dreams: Smuts now has five times as many soldiers as von Lettow-Vorbeck but has come nowhere near defeating the German.

A couple of excited scouts come running back in the heat. They have seen the enemy approaching along the road. Orders are given and the line of lying men rises and moves towards the road with their weapons at the ready. Buchanan is in command of two Vickers heavy machine guns and manages to get them set up in firing position. Further along the road they can see German
askaris
, who have just left the village. Buchanan tells the story:

On these we immediately opened machine-gun and rifle fire, surprising them completely, and inflicting severe casualties. Notwithstanding this they retaliated, gamely enough for a little, but our firing wore them down, and soon those that remained were silent, and fleeing in the bush.

Much of the new military technology had problems functioning in the African terrain and the African climate. Motor vehicles often came to a standstill, artillery got bogged down and aeroplanes failed to find their targets in the dense vegetation. The machine gun, however, proved
to be as murderously effective in Africa as it was in the other theatres of war. (Those with experience from earlier colonial wars already knew this.) During fighting in the bush or in the jungle there is a tendency for rifle fire to go too high. Heavy machine guns, however, can have the same effect as scythes as they send swathes of bullets backwards and forwards through the thick cover about three feet above the ground, dropping anything that is hiding there: and they are all the more effective in that they can easily be put into a fixed firing position by using ratchet wheels.