World War One: A Short History (6 page)

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The Russians withdrew back over the borders, narrowly defeating a German effort to penetrate the eastern one, in the lakes of Masuria, and there was a pause on the Russo-German front. However, there was some compensation for the Russians, because against Austria-Hungary they did well. The agony of the Habsburg empire was beginning. Over fifty Russian infantry and eighteen cavalry divisions were being mustered in southern Poland and the western Ukraine by the end of August, and the Austro-Hungarian forces were considerably weaker – thirty divisions to begin with, and eight more to come from the Balkans. In artillery, they were weaker than Russian divisions. They were also victims of collapsing-empire syndrome, otherwise known as ‘overstretch’ – the contest between pride and reality.

The Austro-Hungarian commander, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf,
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was a clever man. He knew that his forces (in all, not even fifty infantry divisions, which received less money – £25,000,000 – than the British six) were too weak to deal with Russia, quite apart from Serbia, the army of which was roughly one quarter the size of Austria-Hungary’s. He had an undertaking with Moltke that he would use nearly all of his army against Russia, while Germany dealt with France. However, the war with Serbia was undeniably popular, and his forces would be strong enough to deal with that if the Russians were not, at once, an effective threat. Without telling the Germans, he arranged for the armies destined for the Russian front to ‘detrain’ (as the British army calls it) along the Carpathian mountains, a hundred miles from the border. The Russians could toil through the plains of Galicia, southern Poland, the Germans in East Prussia would perhaps move into northern Poland, and meanwhile the other half of the Austro-Hungarian army would settle the hash of the Serbians. Conrad could always explain to the Germans that this situation had long been foreseeable
– that war would come about between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, and that the Russians would be slow to make up their minds, so that the mobilization of Austria-Hungary would probably have been decided against Serbia in the first instance. This was not really a very plausible excuse, the war minister himself subsequently admitting that no one had had any real doubts as to whether Russia would intervene. Provoking her was the reason for the war. When the Germans heard what was happening, they protested, in a bombardment of messages, from the Kaiser downwards.

Conrad had to explain that the troops had already set off for the Balkans – in German eyes, an absurd misuse of a Great Power’s troops at the start of a world war. Could they be rerouted? He asked his railway experts, and they were appalled: how could trains be re-routed along single-track lines in the middle of a general mobilization? The railways in Austria-Hungary reflected the fact that it was a multi-national empire, each people having to be bought off with this or that impractical concession. To stop Austrian goods reaching Hungary, for example, nineteen lines ended in buffers on the Austro-Hungarian border, and you had to travel from Austrian Slovenia, a few miles from Hungarian Croatia, either by a picturesque mountain railway or, more quickly, via Budapest. There were still private lines, and the railway in Bosnia had a different gauge, so that everything had to be transhipped on the border, at Bosnisch-Brod. The railway experts said that the mobilization against Serbia, already ordained, would have to take its course, but once the troops had detrained in the Balkans they could be loaded back into their trains and taken to the Russian front. The railwaymen were probably exaggerating, not too many of the troops of the four army corps in question having, in fact, left Prague and Budapest when Russian mobilization occurred. The experts did behave with paralysing caution, knowing that if anything went wrong there could be a disaster
(railway-management was a key to this war, the German official history devoting two of its eleven volumes to the subject). They even decreed that, to avoid any possible snarl-up, all trains were to move at what they called ‘maximum parallel graphic’, by which was meant the maximum speed of the worst train on the worst line – ten miles per hour. Anything else, and the pins on the maps would have become hopelessly jumbled, with watering, coal and telegrams in a mess. It is true that even the best-run railways could go wrong – on the lines of the French
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there was an accident every day, and it is true that, just before the British offensive on the Somme two years later, there was a traffic jam at Amiens station that went on for eighteen miles. Still, the Austro-Hungarian railway experts’ caution meant that mobilization occurred at a speed less than that of a decent bicycle.

With one of his armies proceeding in the wrong direction, Conrad now reinstated the original plan for deployment in southern Poland. But the railway timetables again could not be improvised, and three other armies were detrained in the Carpathian stations, having then to be marched forward for a hundred miles in August heat. The other army – the Second – did get out on the Serbian border, stayed in tents for a while, became sucked into a failed action, and was then reloaded and taken across southern Hungary, arriving in Galicia nearly five weeks after the war had started. Once there it did not flourish. The first consequence of all this was that the grandly proclaimed offensive against Serbia failed. The commander, Potiorek – a neurotic homosexual and Conrad’s rival, with good court connections – communicated with his chief of staff only on barely readable notes and was smarting from his failure to protect the Archduke. Moving over almost trackless mountains, slightly inferior in number to the Serbs and, unlike them, entirely inexperienced in war, the two Austro-Hungarian armies were too widely separated. The left-hand one was overwhelmed
(16–19 August), causing both to withdraw. Other efforts, up to December, similarly failed.

On the north-eastern front, two Austro-Hungarian armies were ready by 21 August, somewhat before the Russians, and there were engagements on the northern border with Russian Poland, where the Austrians did quite well, forcing back two Russian armies at more or less the same moment as the Germans captured most of the Eighth Army. However, the success was gained at the expense of the eastern part of this front. Here, one Austro-Hungarian army, the Third, stood on a river not far from the Russian border, and the missing Second army from Serbia came in only on 8 September. Overall, the Russian superiority of numbers was 750,000 to 500,000, with proportions even greater in artillery and machine guns; and that superiority had been concentrated on the eastern side. The single Austro-Hungarian army made matters worse for itself by attacking, and it was soon overwhelmed, the Russians entering the provincial capital, Lvov (German name Lemberg, by which this battle is known overall), on 3 September. Austro-Hungarian counter-strokes failed, and a general retreat was ordered, to the Carpathian foothills and the outskirts of Cracow, far to the west.

The war’s pattern had been set: in the west a stalemate, and in the east a more or less constant Austro-Hungarian crisis. How should Germany, her resources only now being properly mobilized, respond? Moltke’s nerves had collapsed, and he was replaced by a less hysterical figure, the Prussian minister of war, Erich von Falkenhayn. At first, there was no particular reason to panic. There had been enormous losses but, even so, troops would simply be brought back to the right level of numbers and they would try again. By now, it was clear enough that if troops attacked frontally, they would be met by a hail of shell and small-arms fire from positions in the ground that
guns could not easily deal with. Both sides in France therefore tried moving into what was still an open flank, north-west of the Aisne lines, one of the oldest manoeuvres in warfare, because attackers on a flank could fire from the side at unprotected defenders who would be ‘enfiladed’, i.e. caught in a vulnerable line that would not be able to fire back. The trouble was that the attackers in these cases were not able to move fast enough, and there was also a lack of artillery. From mid September the clashes went on, further and further to the northwest, resulting in trench-lines that finally reached the sea on the coast of Flanders. The medieval town of Ypres was defended by the British against a formidable German attack, designed to clear Belgium altogether, as new troops came in on the German side raised principally from the oldest school pupils and from student volunteers. In late October and the first half of November, a very bloody battle went on, the British holding grimly on to the town and the subsequently famous area of ‘the Ypres salient’. A salient was a part of the line that jutted out into enemy territory, and defenders were exceedingly vulnerable to fire from three sides. It would have been sensible to withdraw to a safer position, but public opinion had been whipped up to such an extent that such withdrawals would have been seen as a confession of defeat. The battle cost each side 130,000 casualties. It marked the end of the old British regular army (60,000), and the Belgians lost a third of their remaining army. For the Germans it was the ‘massacre of the innocents’, these hardly trained student volunteers whose units in some cases lost 60 per cent of their strength. They have 25,000 graves in the German cemetery at Langemarck.

Both sides started to develop the trench-lines, and they became more and more formidable. The front-line troops lived in ‘dug-outs’, underground dormitories and storehouses that were built into the trench-wall facing the enemy, for protection from shelling. Belts of barbed wire were placed in front of the
line, which was also constructed in such a way as to avoid enfilading fire, i.e. in a zig-zag. Communications trenches, also zig-zagging their way back to a safer area with hospitals and supplies, were needed, and in time several lines of trenches might be dug, in case of retreat. In wet weather the trenches became very muddy, and duck-boards were used; there was also a great problem with vermin – rats fed on the corpses, and lice flourished in uniforms (a Turkish practice of placing a jacket on an ant-hill was followed, because the ants ate the lice, though their own stings were formidable). This situation of stalemate marked the entire western front by mid November 1914. In military terms it was not entirely new. In the past, besiegers and besieged had often held each other off for months, and Marlborough’s campaigns in much the same territory had been very slow-moving. What was new about the situation of 1914 was its scale: millions of men, far better supplied and cared for than troops of the past, were completely immobilized in lines that were perhaps a hundred yards apart. On the whole, the Germans held the high ground and were therefore able to dig deeper before reaching the water-table, which in Flanders was quite close to the surface, the whole place having been rescued from the sea by competent medieval drainage. British troops, untrained volunteers, stumbled around in the sticky mud that was so well remembered as the main feature of the British part of the western front.

In the east, conditions were somewhat different. The front, almost a thousand miles, was twice as long, but there were fewer troops. In theory, Russia should have been able to draw upon countless millions of men, her population of 170 million being almost twice that of Germany and Austria-Hungary put together. But conscripts cost money, and the Russian war budget could not stretch to feeding and clothing more than a quarter of the available manpower. Men were therefore exempted on various grounds – religion, physical standards,
drawing the long straw in a lottery. The largest exemption occurred because of ‘family status’. If a man was a ‘breadwinner’ he did not join the army. Early in August, 2 million peasants got married, to the bewilderment of the War Ministry, which could only imagine that they intended to do their patriotic duty by producing children. The Russian first-line army, at 5 million, was no greater than the German, and on the eastern front there were generally some ninety Russian divisions to some eighty German and Austro-Hungarian ones. There were 1,500 Russians per mile of front, as against 5,000 Frenchmen, and the latter were much better armed. There was more. In the west, there were railways to transport men relatively quickly to some threatened part of the front. In Russian Poland, such railways were far fewer, and the movement of reserves was always a difficult business: at one stage, in October 1914, the High Command more or less lost a whole army, milling around the streets of Warsaw. In these circumstances, the eastern war remained one of movement, though the movement itself was generally meaningless.

In mid September the Germans realized that they would have to do something to save their ally’s position. Ludendorff came to see Conrad, and at this stage, as a north German farmer’s son, he was still easily awed by the grandeur of the Habsburgs, the more so as Austro-Hungarian headquarters had been moved away from the barracks of Przemysl to considerably more comfortable arrangements on a small estate at Teschen belonging to the nominal commander, Archduke Friedrich, and his wife, a Princess Croy (known as ‘Busabella’). He charged rent for its use, and Conrad himself was from time to time preoccupied with organizing a Hungarian and Protestant divorce for the love of his life, whom he could not have married under Austrian (and Catholic) law. Conrad persuaded Ludendorff that the Austro-Hungarian army was in its then dreadful condition because it had been holding off the Russians so that
Germany would win in the west. The condition was indeed dreadful. It had lost half a million men, 100,000 of them captured, and Przemysl, the great fortress on the northern slopes of the Carpathians, had been shut in, with a garrison of 120,000. No doubt it could have collapsed, as every other fortress did, but the mud all around was so thick that the Russians could not manoeuvre their heavy artillery, of which, in any event, they had too little. Still, there was clearly an Austro-Hungarian emergency, and a German army with Ludendorff in charge was moved to positions north of Cracow. There followed two months of manoeuvring, not unimpressive on the map, but leading nowhere. Ludendorff said that he would have done better had he had more troops.