World War One: A Short History (8 page)

Faced with what was a deadly threat, the Turks resolved on a fatal step. There had been an Armenian rising in the east, at Van, where the Muslim town was destroyed with much slaughter. Just before the British landing, Enver and Talat ordered the deportation of the Armenian population from the whole country, except Istanbul and Izmir, on the grounds that its loyalty was mainly dubious. Appeals by the Tsar, the Patriarch in Russian Armenia, several prominent Anatolian Armenians, and, finally, rebellions just behind the front line
convinced the Young Turks that they must take desperate measures. The Armenians had for generations counted as ‘the most loyal’ of the minorities, and even in 1914 their leader, Boghos Nubar, was offered a place in the government (he refused on the grounds that his Turkish was not up to it). Scenes of great cruelty ensued, as at least 700,000 people were marched or crammed into trains towards northern Syria, to camps where a great many died of starvation and disease. There were well-documented massacres along the way.

On 25 April, Allied troops were landed at five beaches around the south-western tip of the Gallipoli Peninsula, but they were outnumbered (five divisions to six) and the naval artillery was inaccurate against concealed field guns, or for that matter just in general. The British lost heavily during the landings, and then found the terrain very difficult – wooded, and uphill, with British positions dominated by Turks on the slopes further up. The Australian and New Zealand volunteer force had a particularly challenging area – ‘Anzac Cove’ – but both sides dug trenches and staged frontal assaults. Even water was a problem for the invaders, as it had to be rowed in, each boat carrying none too much and usually vulnerable to fire from the dominating slopes. In August, with three fresh divisions, the British tried a landing further north, along the coast at Suvla Bay, and that, too, failed – the troops did not move inland very far, although for a time they were unopposed, because the elderly commander wanted to make sure all stores were properly landed before proceeding. Meanwhile the Turks, far from collapsing, put up a display of extraordinary resilience, one young commander, Kemal (the later) Atatürk, making his national reputation in this battle. Eventually the government in London lost faith in the whole enterprise, and the expedition was brought to a (professionally managed) end early in January 1916. It had cost half a million Allied casualties, mainly British, and cost the Turks at least quarter of a million. In this period
of the war there were further setbacks for the British, as when an expedition to Baghdad, an epic of inefficiency, was stopped in the winter of 1915–16 and a British division surrendered at Kut-el-Amara in the spring. Ottoman intervention, as far as the Germans were concerned, was now working out tolerably well.

But the Germans had done well elsewhere, too, mainly because the blockade had given them the will and the way for a proper war economy, ahead of others. The new commander (in effect: in this war, imperial figures were the nominal commanders-in-chief, and chiefs of staff were the real ones, much as generals pranced around on horses in public but used motor-cars if they had anything serious to do), Erich von Falkenhayn, was a much more calculating man than Moltke. He had a sense (perhaps exemplifying Goethe’s famous line, ‘genius knows when to stop’) that taking on three Great Powers was beyond Germany’s strength, and he told the Kaiser that if she did not lose this war she would in effect have won. His hope, and it dictated his doings, was that Russia could be persuaded to drop out and resume the partnership with Prussia that had reigned in much of the nineteenth century. He was a Bismarckian, not wishing, as Bismarck had said, ‘to tie the trim Prussian frigate to a worm-eaten Austrian galleon’, and he did not like the Austro-Hungarians, in his view frivolous Catholics with fancy manners (there was only one Catholic officer in the Prussian Guard – Franz von Papen, who ineptly organized sabotage of the American economy when he was military attacheá in Washington, and whose subsequent claim to fame is that he in effect appointed Hitler). Like Bismarck, Falkenhayn thought that Germany should never part company with Russia, and his relations with Conrad became, at times, frigid, to the point where he simply did not reveal major decisions that affected Austria-Hungary very greatly. At an important stage he even got his liaison officer to find out by stealth what the railway
capacity north of Cracow was, so as to stage an offensive about which he told his allies only a week beforehand. At an even more vital point, he and Conrad quite separately planned grand, supposedly war-winning, attacks on France and Italy in complete isolation from each other.

German peace-feelers towards Russia were left more or less ignored, though the brightest retired Tsarist statesmen would have taken up the offer. The western Powers had offered the Tsar Constantinople, which Falkenhayn could not do, and in any case there was a campaign, somewhat vicious, against the substantial German element in Russia, much of which dated back to the days of Catherine the Great, who had brought in German peasants to show the Russians how to practise agriculture. Land reform – land to the peasant – had been a great theme in Russian politics before 1914 and now, if you were a war hero, there were provisions for you to get confiscated German land. The Tsar’s German wife became a liability. At any rate, the Tsar was in no position to discuss peace terms with the Germans, unless, in effect, he had no choice.

Therefore, German attacks in the east. Falkenhayn, like Churchill, knew that the west offered only stalemate, and he was quite right. He tried one final attack in the west, again at Ypres in April 1915, and it was, like unrestricted U-Boat warfare, another exercise in Prussian crassness. A new weapon had come to hand – poison gas, banned by The Hague conventions, but justified for the weaseling reason that French rifle-bullets also released a gas on impact. It was indeed a horrible weapon, coming to blind or wreck the lungs of its victims. It was first tried out on the Russian front, in January, but the extreme cold reduced its effectiveness. In April, gas was released from cylinders, and it did cause immediate panic among the British and Canadians. But then the Germans themselves had to advance into it, and makeshift answers were found – cotton wool soaked in urine held off the effects for half an hour, and,
later, there were proper gas masks. In any case, although the Ypres salient became even more uncomfortable for the British, there was no breakthrough, and Falkenhayn would not have known what to do with one. His main aim was at Russia.

Here, Falkenhayn had some good fortune, because the western Powers dispersed their effort between Gallipoli and the front in France. The latter caused fixation. On the map, the German line looked very vulnerable, because it bellied out in an extended salient, with Noyon, fifty miles from Paris, at the apex, and the French newspapers led every day with that news. Generals looking for favourable publicity were duly mesmerized: some new attack would bring about liberation of the national territory. British volunteers, in millions, had abandoned the boredom of life in industrial towns for the supposed glamour of a soldier’s existence and were ready and willing to go. Salients were vulnerable to attacks from the sides, Artois on the northern edge, where the British Expeditionary Force was building up its strength, and Champagne, north-east of Paris, on the southern edge. If the British and French could break through in either area, then they could ‘pour’ cavalry through the gap, and perhaps surround the Germans in the central part of this salient. Here was the stuff of fantasy, and elderly generals, their experiences formed from cavalry charges in the South African veldt or the sand-table campaigns of Morocco, dreamt of glory. How this appeared on the ground has been described in one of the classic memoirs of the war, Robert Graves’s
Goodbye to All That
. Graves was a public schoolboy, infused with the romantic patriotism of the time, and volunteered as he left Charterhouse. His regiment’s regular officers believed in rituals. Officers dressed in baggy shorts, as if they were in India; colonels made it their business to make life humiliating for ‘warts’ – subalterns – even if, in civilian life, these had been prosperous and successful men. Not many of the commanders were at all bright, and some were downright dim.

The first attempt of the British Expeditionary Force had been at a village called Neuve Chapelle on 10 April. In this early stage of the war, trench lines were still fairly undeveloped, and the British had massed guns in adequate numbers for the enemy trench to be overcome and then occupied. However, what then? German reserves arrived by train to another line, and British reserves came up on foot, each carrying sixty pounds of equipment – the equivalent of a heavy suitcase. The cavalry moved forward in expectation, and clogged the roads. But the guns had not registered the new German line, and the infantry were tired. Subsequent attacks therefore failed. These episodes were repeated in May, without the initial success. However, volunteers for the army were now arriving in droves, and in September, in concert with the French, a new and much more sizeable attack was planned. At Loos, a mining town, the British even released gas, but, as Graves describes the effort, it was a fiasco – the sort of British blunder that soldiers remember from the early stages of either world war. Gas was to be released from cylinders. The spanners to unscrew them were the wrong size. The chemistry teachers knew nothing much about poison gas, and hated what they were doing, and the military were not more respectful of bewildered chemistry teachers. The wind was wrong, but since the cylinders were in place, the order was given for the gas to be released, and it blew back on the British. The little town of Loos was captured, but the two reserve divisions were kept too far back, and advanced in a hurry over duck-boards in communications trenches, or along roads that were jammed axle-to-axle with carts, guns and the ineffable cavalry, arriving far too late to do anything further except be slaughtered over the next two days. This at least caused a change in the British command, because Sir John French was discredited and was replaced by Sir Douglas Haig, who had the king’s ear and had performed quite creditably in 1914. The French attack in Champagne was rather more effective, in
that on 25 September a sizeable artillery superiority, and then inefficient German defences, allowed a breakthrough and the capture, even, of 200 guns, a considerable haul. Reserves marched forward to exploit the gap, but then the problems re-asserted themselves – German defenders arriving by train, a new line to be reconnoitred and, a problem subsequently to become very well-known, a battlefield to be crossed that had already been shattered by shelling, with shell-holes sometimes full of rain-water and corpses. The life-blood of France was draining away.

The life-blood of the Habsburg empire was also draining away, though with hundreds of thousands of captives rather than battle casualties. As 1915 began, the army was strung along the Carpathian mountains, hoping to hold the various passes. However, the fortress of Przemysl had been left behind in the retreat, and it contained 120,000 men, with supplies that would only last until the end of March. If circumstances had been as elsewhere, the place would no doubt have fallen to heavy guns, as Liège and the others did, but the Russian siege army had few. So, fatally, ‘the bulwark on the San’ (as propaganda called it) held out, and Austro-Hungarian prestige seemed to depend on it – if it did collapse, so, too, might military morale, and perhaps various potential enemies might be encouraged to intervene. However, it is an elementary mistake in strategy to become dependent on fortifications: the enemy thereby knows what you will have to do. Now, the Russians knew perfectly well that there would be Austrian relief attempts from the Carpathians; there was even a modest German force,
Suüdarmee
. From 23 January to the middle of March three of these attacks went ahead, at mountain altitudes, and even the Austrian official historians, whose kindness to Conrad sometimes involves suppression of truth, call it ‘a cruel folly’. Whole units froze to death, shells either became buried in snow or
bounced off ice, rifles had to be held over a fire before they would work. Some 800,000 men were sacrificed in these affairs, three quarters of them through sickness, and desertion became a serious problem. There were fears that many Slav troops, Ruthenes (Austrian Ukrainians) or Czechs in particular, would be unreliable, and one historic Prague regiment was even disbanded.

The Germans on their side were rather more successful. Hindenburg had taken the title ‘Supreme Commander in the East’ (shortened to
Oberost
) in November, his forces having doubled in number from the twenty divisions at the start, and there were now tussles between Ludendorff and Falkenhayn, who resented his popularity and thought his plans far too ambitious. However, the Austro-Hungarian emergency did force Falkenhayn to send four newly formed army corps to the Russian front, and, early in February, these attacked south-east from the Prussian border, in an affair called ‘the Winter Battle in Masuria’. In deep snow, the virtuosity of the German army was displayed, one Russian army being struck as it was forming up for an offensive, and another being taken so far by surprise that its commander, a man of seventy, had a nervous collapse and fled to the fortress of Kovno (he was sentenced to fifteen years’ hard labour). One Russian army corps was trapped in a forest, as at Tannenberg on a smaller scale. After that, attacks were exchanged on the Polish–East Prussian borders, and they tended to show that Falkenhayn was right, that Ludendorff was too ambitious: unless there were spectacular Russian blundering, German losses were too high for any gains that might emerge. In any case, Austria-Hungary now needed direct assistance. On 22 March, Przemysl surrendered, and the Russian force thus freed was used for an attack across the Carpathian passes, leading towards the great plain of Hungary, and there were fears even for Budapest. Early in April, on Easter Sunday, a German force, the
Beskidenkorps
, under one of their most
competent generals, Georg von der Marwitz, had staved off the immediate danger, but matters could clearly only become worse if nothing more substantial were done.