It was a big thing too, though to have thrown in the same force on a narrower front would probably have been preferable. The inner flanks of Kuropatkin’s and Evert’s groups were to attack on a front of ninety miles. The whole of this front was not to be assailed simultaneously, but in sections, with the main weight on either side of Lake Naroch, which has given its name to the battle. Numerically, the Russian superiority was great, about five to two, but as on the Somme, though on a simpler pattern, the Germans had strongly fortified their front. The ground had of course been frozen to the consistency of rock, but on 18 March, though the ice on the lake and the rivers remained unbroken, up to a foot of water overlaid it. This was not good weather for an offensive.

The tragic story can be shortly told. The artillery preparation troubled the defence far less than when most ineffective on the Somme. The troops of the armies of Scholtz and Hutier were fully on the alert. One after another of the disjointed Russian attacks rushed into their fire and broke down completely with heavy slaughter. What penetration was made could be measured in hundreds of yards, and it was sooner or later recovered. German losses were about 20,000; Russian 110,000 including 10,000 prisoners. Like previous winter battles in Russia, this was marked by exceptional suffering. There must be still about a few veterans with limbs maimed by frostbite in this campaign.

The next cry for aid came to the Tsar from Italy in May. The Italians were being driven back by the Austrians and could claim that among their foes were divisions transferred from Russia. The fate of Verdun still hung on a thread. The Russian command had previously decided that the main offensive of the year should be launched in the centre, but now, since Evert was not ready, it demanded of the new commander of the South-west Front, Brusilov, whether he could help. He said yes. He was that kind of man, and Nicholas II had done few better services to the Russian Army than in appointing him to succeed the hesitant Ivanov. Brusilov had already demanded that he should take part in the offensive and had been given a free hand, but told to expect no reinforcements. Having watched the mounting of earlier offensives, he realized that the laborious preparations gave them away. He therefore ordered his army commanders to get to work at some twenty points and disposed his reserves so that they afforded no clue to his intentions. He realized that this dispersion would weaken his blows, but he was ready to pay that price for surprise. His main attacks were to be made in two sectors, on his right opposite Luck and on his left in the valleys of the Dniester and the Prut. One attraction of the latter was that success would impress Rumania, still neutral, but apparently edging towards the cause of the Entente.¹ When on 24 May the call came to attack alone he was nearly ready to do so on these lines. His four armies, from south to north Ninth, Seventh, Eleventh, and Eighth, were faced by five: the Austrian Seventh and the Austro-German (German commanded) South Army; the Austrian Second and First in Böhm-Ermolli’s Army Group; the Austrian Fourth and two independent corps in Linsingen’s Army Group, Linsingen being a German officer but coming under the Austrian supreme command. On paper the Russians had only a slight superiority, about forty against thirty-eight divisions, but the Russian were much the bigger.²

The bombardment opened on 4 June. That day infantry attacks penetrated to any depth at two points only, but on the morrow the full weight of the offensive changed the situation drastically. Time after time, when the enemy made a slight penetration such as was inevitable here and there, the Austrian troops to either flank, though hardly attacked or not attacked at all, made off rearwards. The eager and impetuous Russians seized their chances. They tore a yawning breach in the Austrian Fourth Army. Some Austrian divisions disappeared. Enormous losses, coupled with ‘the moral collapse of the troops’ made any further stand impossible.³ By 6 June the Fourth Army was in disorderly retreat. In the south much the same thing happened to the Seventh Army. The multi-racial amalgam was splitting up. The Archduke Joseph’s good regiments in the Fourth Army had melted in the furnace and his numerous Ruthenian regiments had stopped fighting. The South Army and the Austrian Second had hardly been attacked.

By 9 June Brusilov had taken over seventy thousand prisoners. Yet now, in the Russian Empire’s greatest victory of the war, old weaknesses were reappearing. First, Brusilov learnt that a promised offensive on the West Front commanded by Evert must be postponed. Next he was told by Alexiev that the attack as planned could not take place and that a smaller action at Baranovichi, eighty miles north of Pinsk, would be substituted for it. He was deeply enraged. He felt that he was being left virtually on his own and that the value of his victory was being frittered away. The truth was that Evert was scared of launching a full-scale attack on a purely German part of the front, thoroughly on the alert. On 13 June he put in a small attack at Baranovichi with two Guards divisions. It was smashed by the German fire and these fine troops were largely sacrificed to bad leadership.

Falkenhayn and Conrad from the rear, Hindenburg from the north, were providing such aid as they could, but so far it was only scraps. Lack of reserves, ammunition, and transport rather than any serious stiffening in the defence brought Brusilov’s offensive practically to a stop by mid-June. He was determined that the halt should be only temporary. His southern thrust had already penetrated nearly thirty miles, the northern fifty, and twenty-five miles beyond the lower Styr to the Stochod.

While Brusilov was taking breath Linsingen struck back at the northern Russian salient on 16 June. The Germans had compelled Conrad to remove the Archduke Joseph from the command of the Austrian Fourth Army and he had been replaced by the Hungarian General Tersztyanski; but the main motive power of the counter-offensive was in the Assault Group of General von der Marwitz, which had three good and well-rested German divisions. Some ground was recovered south of Kovel, but the result was in general a sad disappointment. The maximum gain after four days’ fighting was up to eight or nine miles, which would have looked splendid at Verdun or later on the Somme, but did not count for much in these vast spaces in which troops were always thin on the ground by comparison with the Western Front. In other ways it confirmed the lessons of Verdun, which were to be further confirmed on the Somme, that counterstrokes against an enemy engaged in an all-out and successful offensive can rarely be expected to win more than a very limited success. Often enough those projected cannot even be set going. Falkenhayn decided to send German reinforcements all the way to Pflanzer-Baltin’s front on the extreme right to provide the stiffening for a big counter-offensive, but one after another they had to be diverted on the way to other even more pressing tasks.

On the other hand, the next Russian effort, a renewed offensive north of Baranovichi in greater strength than the last, proved a fiasco. Advancing on 3 July, as usual in dense masses, the Russians were mown down by the fire of the German and Austrian defenders of Prince Leopold of Bavaria’s group of Armies.¹ Against the German corps involved they failed completely; in the Austrian corps also attacked they made a hardly appreciable dent. It was a grievous reverse and left Brusilov still on his own.

At least Alexiev was sending him as reinforcements troops whom Evert and Kuropatkin were too frightened to use against the Germans and greater numbers than Germany and Austria had drawn from the Western Front, Italy, and the Balkans. Brusilov pressed on again. After strokes here and there with mixed fortunes, mostly in his favour, he renewed the offensive on the whole front on 28 July. He now won further successes which would have crowned with laurels the heads of many leaders but did not seem great in the light of what he had already done. Again shortage of ammunition—or means to get it to his batteries—checked him. Yet with unconquerable spirit and unbending will he drove his armies forward yet again on 7 August. This time, despite the arrival in the south of more German divisions, he did well, pressing up the slopes of the Carpathians and overrunning the whole of the Bukovina. By now, however, the enemy’s reinforcements were beginning to give some cohesion to the front and the Russian commander could no longer maintain the momentum of his attack. North of the Pripet nothing had been done to help him and, except for the two attacks at Baranovichi, nothing had been attempted. He made one last effort in September in support of Rumania, now in the war, but fatigue, losses, and the strain on his communications had sapped his offensive power and he could accomplish little more. In October the Brusilov Offensive came to a dead stop. Brusilov’s armies had captured upwards of four hundred thousand prisoners and upwards of five hundred guns.

At an early stage in the fighting the Germans had set about the task of securing a single command—their own, of course—over the whole Eastern Front. Falkenhayn afterwards thought that the agitation was part of a plot to make Hindenburg Chief of the General Staff in his place, which as we have seen was done. At all events the struggle was long and hot. Austria’s pride was offended, and Conrad leapt forward to defend it. The two Emperors were dragged in. The allies belaboured each other in speech and writing as heartily as the Russians belaboured them physically. Finally Francis Joseph, fearing that his dominions might break apart, perhaps even that Hungary might seek a separate peace, yielded to the German arguments. At last agreement was reached in a German victory, though not quite complete because it failed to secure the whole front. On 30 July Hindenburg’s command was extended southward 225 miles beyond the Pripet to just south of Tarnopol. As a sop to the Austrians the rest of the front southward to the Rumanian frontier was entrusted to a group of armies under the independent command of the Archduke Carl, the heir to the throne. It was hoped that loyalty to the house of Habsburg would be strengthened thereby and influence the Army favourably. The Archduke, however, had to take as staff officer, preceptor, and Hindenburg’s agent, General von Seeckt. Thus Hindenburg acquired practical control throughout. He held it for a fortnight only before succeeding Falkenhayn as Chief of the General Staff and taking Ludendorff with him to the Western Front. His place on the Eastern was taken by Prince Leopold of Bavaria as Supreme Commander East (Oberbefehlshaber Ost), with Max Hoffmann as Chief of Staff—and again as the man who counted. As Hoffmann said of the chief who treated him with extraordinary kindness and trust: Prince Leopold was ‘certainly much cleverer than——’ (a good guess is that he wrote ‘Hindenburg’ and that a prudent editor struck out the name) but he was ‘scarcely the star performer’ and not to be considered ‘responsible’.¹

Brusilov is the only commander of the First World War after whom a great victory has been named. It is universally known to this day as ‘the Brusilov Offensive’. The title is well deserved. Hardly another instance can be found where one man by unflinching will and determination made a brilliant victory so largely his own. He always believed that if he had been supported by the two other commanders of army groups, Evert and Kuropatkin, a decisive victory—decisive for the fate of the whole war—would have been gained. We cannot be sure. North of the Pripet the Russians had to reckon not only with the defensive power of German troops and their great strength in artillery, but with their superior technical means for the purpose of fortification. However hard the Austrians had worked—and they had done a lot of digging—they could not have produced defences equal to those of the Germans. Yet it can hardly be denied that to make no serious attempt to back Brusilov’s victory was folly as well as failure of courage on the part of the Russian command. The casualties on all fronts were vast.

The campaign shook both Russians and Austrians. It certainly contributed to the fate of the Russian Army in the following year. Yet for the Austro-Hungarian Empire it was a dreadful calamity. The prestige of the imperial forces had sunk. Conrad’s apologists may argue, as he did, that infiltration by the Germans was harmful in some respects and helped to lower Austrian self-confidence and loyalty, but there was no alternative now. Signs of deadly decay, flaws fatal to any army, had appeared. In late July an Austrian division in the First Army lost twelve thousand men, most prisoners of war—all its infantry strength and more—but only two guns.¹ What did this mean? It meant that the divisional artillery had galloped away and left the infantry in the lurch. ‘Batteries in wild flight’ and similar words are used in German and even Austrian accounts. Now in all sound armies the artillery tradition is one of stoutness of heart and self-sacrifice in defeat and retreat. Time and time again, breaking fronts have been re-formed by such courage on the part of the artillery; in many a battle artillery officers have rallied discouraged infantrymen drifting back through the gun-lines and led them forward again. Deeds of this kind are found in the long and fine record of the Austrian artillery. Where this spirit ceases to exist no army can face a hostile offensive with the hope of victory.

The entry of Rumania into the war resembled that of Italy and Bulgaria in being the result of a deal in land which only victory could confirm. Rumania had refused to join the Central Powers in 1914 on the plea that her treaty with Austria did not apply to the state of affairs. She thought the matter over for two years, and then came in on the side of the Entente. She missed a golden opportunity by haggling. Had she made up her mind two months sooner, the case of the Central Powers would indeed have been desperate; in fact, it would seem that there must have been a collapse somewhere, probably in southeast Europe, just possibly on the Somme. As it was, Rumania waited till the fighting on the Russian front was nearing its end. On 17 August she concluded a treaty with the United Kingdom and France. On the 27th she declared war on Germany and Austria.

Her chief prize was to be Transylvania, the fine country west of the Carpathians, but she was also promised the Banat further south and the southern Dobruja, the last-named being Bulgarian territory. Her army numbered some 500,000 men, in 23 divisions, of which 13 were either reserve or improvised formations. It was rather poorly officered—too many of a dandified, idle, patent-leather-booted type still to be found in several armies—only fairly well armed, but with its ranks full of strong peasant soldiers, good material enough if it had been better handled. Alexiev had given the command sound advice: to stand fast in the passes of the Transylvanian Alps, which were easily defensible, and take the offensive through the Dobruja, between the Danube and the Black Sea coast. But the Rumanian Government had its eyes fixed on Transylvania and was determined to secure that territory first. Two armies were, therefore, concentrated along the Transylvanian Alps, one at right-angles to them along the southern Carpathians, where it was in loose touch with Brusilov’s Russians, and only one in the south.

It was there that the enemy got in his first blow. A motley force—German, Bulgarian (the largest), and Turkish—had been assembled under Mackensen on the Bulgarian frontier between the sea and the Danube and on the south bank of the great river. On 2 September the right wing invaded the Dobruja and drove back the Rumanians. Despite considerable Russian reinforcements it continued to progress northward all through the month. The disillusioned Rumanians, who must have wished that they had listened to Russian advice, had to rush forces south. Meanwhile in the north they had debouched through the mountain passes into the promised land of Transylvania against slight resistance from the mostly second-grade Austrian troops on the spot. Hurrahs went up from the Entente countries and their sympathizers.

By the early days of September four German divisions were moving east through Hungary by train. The Rumanian advance after coming through the passes became so slow that two armies, the German Ninth (three German and two Austrian divisions) and Austrian First (one German and four Austrian divisions) could be formed and concentrated less than 40 miles from the crests of the Carpathians and Transylvanian Alps. The commander of the Ninth Army was the discarded Chief of the General Staff, Erich von Falkenhayn. He was naturally very much on his mettle in his new role and, it proved, in dazzling form. He wasted no time. He fell upon the Rumanians, first at Hermannstadt on 30 September, then at Kronstadt,¹ on 8 October, defeated them and drove them back. They succeeded, however, in avoiding his attempts to cut them off from the passes and once in the mountains fortified themselves and stood firm. Then Falkenhayn probed one pass after another and by marching and counter-marching bewildered the defence. Finally he decided to stake all on forcing the Vulkan Pass. Now replacing clever and delicate manoeuvre by brute force, he crashed through by 26 November. Another victory, this time in the southern foothills at Targu-Jiu, opened the way into the Rumanian plain. The defence in the other passes having been turned, the Rumanian command decided to abandon them. Simultaneously Mackensen forced a passage of the Danube above Sistova. The two invaders raced each other for Bucharest. Falkenhayn, now reinforced by four more German divisions, won this contest. He entered the Rumanian capital on 5 December, and another column took the valuable oilfields of Ploesti next day.

Long before this the weather had broken. Rain poured down in sheets, causing rivers and streams to overflow and create morasses, turning the wretched roads to quagmires. The Rumanians had destroyed nearly every bridge. Falkenhayn continued to struggle north-eastward, his troops on short rations and without winter clothing. Though Ludendorff provided none of that, Falkenhayn records bitterly, he sent a flood of telegrams, ‘as superfluous as they were distasteful’. In the last days of the year the Rumanians halted and stood fast on the lower Seret. By this time the Russians had taken over the northern frontier of the Dobruja and much of the front running thence to the Carpathians. The forces of the Central Powers had shot their bolt and could do no more. Quiet fell upon the front. The Rumanians had lost 310,000 men, of whom nearly half were prisoners of war.

Instead of acquiring Transylvania, for which she had entered the war, Rumania had lost all her existing territory except the northern province of Moldavia. A temporary capital was established at Jassy. This corner of the kingdom was maintained largely on Russian bounty. One of Brusilov’s best subordinates, Saharhov, commanded the Russian forces directly and the Rumanian through their own General Staff. The combined greed and imprudence—not an unusual combination—of the Rumanian Government had brought untold miseries upon the people, but its quiet determination to fight on in what national territory remained to it was not without dignity.

The year had been an unhappy one for Germany and disastrous for her Austrian junior partner. They had both in some measure themselves to blame, since Conrad and Falkenhayn had clearly underestimated the power of recuperation of the Russian Army. They might, however, take some comfort from the fact that the year had ended better than had seemed possible in the east and without a British break-through on the Somme. This result was in part due to the errors and clumsiness of their enemies. It was still more largely due to the excellent and well-run railways of Germany which enabled forces to be swung between the Eastern and Western Fronts with extraordinary speed and to the engineering skill and clever handling of transport which brought them quickly from railheads to firing line. Most of all it was due to the coolness, steadiness and dour resistance of the German troops, in Russia often of the older classes, Landwehr and even Landsturm. German historians talk of Austrian panics and are coy about their own. Panics occurred in the German ranks in Russia. But the general standard of courage, fortitude, and self-confidence was high. The commanders who had such troops to rely on in days of adversity were fortunate. It was almost impossible to ask or expect of them more than they were ready to give and capable of giving.