The Warsaw salient.
Field Marshal Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke was Prussian Chief of Staff 1857–71 and German Chief of Staff 1871–88, after Otto von Bismarck engineered the political unification of the German nation. A great military thinker, Moltke summed up the difference between staff college war games or pre-war plans and the reality of a shooting war in his dictum: ‘No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force.’ Often paraphrased, this remains true, even in the age of smart bombs and drones.
The outset of the First World War illustrates Bismarck’s dictum perfectly – on both sides of the lines. Germany’s Schlieffen Plan called for a rapid encirclement of Paris to decapitate France, but the modified Schlieffen Plan, launched in August 1914, failed to take into account Schlieffen’s deathbed warning to ‘keep the right flank strong’. The resultant failure at encirclement produced the four-year slogging match in the trenches of Flanders. Had the plan gone according to his blueprint, after the collapse of France OHL could have rushed battle-hardened divisions eastwards across Germany’s excellent internal rail network to mount an attack against the vulnerable tongue of Russian-occupied Poland, known as the Warsaw salient, while its Austro-Hungarian allies launched an offensive into Russian-occupied Poland from the south-west.
Less than a decade after the humiliating defeat that ended the war with Japan, the Russian General Staff – Stavka Verkhovnovo Glavnokomanduyushchevo, usually abbreviated to ‘Stavka’ – was staffed by generals who counted on the western marches of the tsarist Empire, for the most part devoid of railways or even roads, as a considerable deterrent for any invader. The lack of communications was, of course, equally an obstacle for Russian forces deployed to meet any invasion. Offensive strategies were the Top Secret Plan 19A, to be rolled out if Austria was the main enemy and Plan 19G, to be used if Germany was the main threat. Plan 19A posited concentrating the major part of the imperial forces against the weaker Austro-Hungarian armies in central and southern Poland, swiftly breaking right through the Carpathian Mountain passes to strike across the Hungarian Plain to Budapest and knocking Austro-Hungary right out of the war after a short campaign. That plan called for leaving just enough men in East Prussia to contain the German forces there until Austro-Hungary was defeated. As a strategy, it might have worked. However, in warfare, the devil is often in the allies one has chosen. The French government desperately needed to divert German divisions from the attempted encirclement of Paris and persuaded Stavka to launch a diversionary pincer movement against the German forces already in East Prussia. The Vilna Army, commanded by General Paul von Rennenkampf, was to attack from the east, to meet up with the Warsaw Army, commanded by General Alexander Samsonov, driving into East Prussia from the south.
The Warsaw salient.
A pincer movement over hundreds of miles requires precise geographical coordination and a strict schedule. Yet, although all sides were intercepting and/or jamming each other’s diplomatic radio traffic, the brains at Stavka were locked into the nineteenth century and Russian military radio communications were transmitted in clear language. They were thus easily intercepted by front-line German wireless interception units, which were so efficient that Marshal Joffre’s ‘Order of the Day for the Battle of the Marne’ in September 1914 was intercepted and read by OHL before it had reached the French front line.54
Worse, between the two prongs of the Russian attack, there was no direct radio link because von Rennenkampf and Samsonov had fallen out during the 1904–05 war with Japan – each accusing the other of being responsible for the defeat – and still refused to speak to each other or to let their staffs communicate directly. Communications between the two armies therefore had to be sent via radio link with Stavka, giving the German interceptors two bites at each apple. As a result, the Germans were able to attack and annihilate the Warsaw army before it was anywhere near linking up with the Vilna army. At the Battle of Tannenberg, 26–30 August 1914, Russian losses were 92,000 men taken prisoner and 50,000 casualties. Two weeks later, Russia had lost 250,000 men; two and a half years later 1.3 million Russians had died in combat, from wounds or from disease, with 3.9 million taken prisoner.
With out-of-date commanders like Samsonov ordering mass attacks of infantry against the terrifying power of twentieth-century firepower, it was inevitable that war on the several Russian fronts would cause millions of casualties, most of them for no military gain. The fitting end of the appallingly inept generalship in East Prussia came when, after Tannenberg, Samsonov’s small party of aides-de-camp, lost in the forests without maps or compass, heard a single shot ring out, as he rightly committed suicide. Russian researchers have criticised uneducated peasant conscripts for trying to describe the horrors of being marched forward into an artillery barrage by using such similes as ‘thunder’, ‘earthquake’, ‘hell’ and so on, but is this so different from images used by educated westerners, like Wilfred Owen’s ‘monstrous anger of the guns’, ‘the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle’ and ‘shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells’?55
Because of the vast distances over which combat ranged in this war of movement,56 individual one-on-one physical violence was more common than in the West. When the artillery had yet to be moved into the line, or the gunners had no shells to fire or infantrymen had no compatible cartridges for their rifles – as happened all too often in the Tsar’s armies – killing was often face-to-face with bayonet, sword, lance, sharpened spades and blunt instruments. The Germans and Austro-Hungarians had an advantage in this area, with a better-developed rail network and many good roads to their rear. This compared with the paucity of roads behind vast stretches of the Russian lines, deliberately left as a wasteland, to deter, or at least delay, any invasion from the west. This theatre of war tied up 2 million Austro-Hungarian troops and about a quarter of all the German armies. An estimated million Austro-Hungarian soldiers and three-quarters of a million Germans, plus nearly four million Russians, died and were buried there – or had their bodies scavenged by animals if comrades had no time to dig a grave before retreating or advancing elsewhere. And then there were the uncounted civilian casualties of all ages and many nationalities as the fluid fronts advanced and receded and advanced again and receded again …
In the history of warfare, no greater contrast may be found than that between the static trench warfare of the Western Front and the slaughter on the Russian fronts, which spread over thousands of miles, creating enormous logistical problems for both sides. In this war of movement, simply ensuring food, clothing and ammunition reached the millions of men, plus fodder for millions of draught and cavalry horses and officers’ mounts, was an insoluble headache.
One British observer with the Russian armies was Colonel Alfred Knox, referred to by Winston Churchill as ‘an agent of singular discernment, whose luminous and pitiless despatches’ were of great use to the British government in following developments there.57 Knox knew the Russian mind. He spoke German, Russian and French – the last being the second language of the Russian educated classes – and was personally acquainted with many senior officers of the several Russian armies and with Tsar Nicholas, also the handsome and charming Russian Commander-in-Chief Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich who, at seven feet tall, towered over the slightly built Tsar. Knox also knew personally the Tsarina and the four princesses Olga, Maria, Tatiana and Anastasia as well as the Tsarevich, or crown prince, Alexei. As a man of his time, never once did Knox display any lack of courtesy to the royal family, although Nicholas was known to his intimates as an ignorant and indecisive man totally unfit to exercise autocracy, who had inherited the title of Tsar on the death of his father, Alexander III, complaining that he did not want to rule. It was true that he had never been given any instruction by Alexander, who thought him too stupid to waste time on, but the greatest of his many personality flaws was that of a weak man who mistook stubbornness for strength. On being given the advice, before taking any decision always to consult his uncles the grand dukes because they had older and wiser heads, Nicholas had reluctantly accepted the crown, but gradually stopped consulting his uncles in favour of his bride, the dominating Princess Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt. Beautiful and elegant, she was also cripplingly superstitious and prone to influence by the ‘Siberian priest and horse-thief’ Rasputin who was apparently able to stop by hypnosis the potentially fatal internal haemorrages of Crown Prince Alexei, who suffered from haemophilia.
Knox’s book entitled With the Russian Army, 1914–1917, being chiefly extracts from the diary of a military attaché,58 begins with a modest observation:
The writer can at any rate claim to have enjoyed greater opportunities for observation of the Russian army [sic] than any other foreign observer, both previous to the war [when he was] Military Attaché to the British Embassy at Petrograd [sic] and during the war as a liaison officer at the front.
On one occasion, Col Knox accompanied a Russian officer to the nearest railway station to see why no mail was being delivered by the polevaya pochta, or field postal services. They found enormous piles of mailbags addressed to men at the front, weighing a total of 32 tons. Taking the stationmaster to task, they were told that the regional governor had not provided enough carts for onward transport, so nothing could be done. Knox commented: ‘A man like this [station master] should be hung [sic] when one remembers how poor fellows at the front long for news from home.’59 That other eyewitness of Russian events, British Consul Robert Bruce Lockhart, wrote of Knox: ‘…no man took a saner view of the military situation on the Eastern [sic] front and no foreign observer supplied his government with more reliable information.’60
Knox recorded that, although the Tsar’s uncle Grand Duke Nikolai had reluctantly accepted the position of commander-in-chief on the approach of war, he had formerly been inspector-general of cavalry and commander of the St Petersburg military district – and thus had no prior knowledge of Stavka’s plans, which had been made two or three years earlier. He was in any case somewhat of a figurehead, surrounded by his own courtiers and usually preferring ‘not to get in the generals’ way’.61
On Saturday 15 August, Col Knox was on board the grand duke’s train and noted in his diary its good but simple cooking with a glass of vodka or wine and cognac with the coffee.62 His host occupied himself on the journey in rubber-stamping Plan 19G. He would have done better to reflect on the impossibility of executing it with a problem identified by Col Knox as the overwhelming preponderance of Russian guns on many fronts being rendered useless because no shells were available at the batteries for the gunners to fire.63
In July and August 1914 Russian mobilisation was faster than the Germans had reckoned possible because of a clandestine call-up during the diplomatically termed ‘Period Preparatory to War’. By the end of the year, 5 million men were wearing the Tsar’s uniforms, of which 2.2 million were front-line troops. Yet Knox commented that this was ‘a poor performance, for the adult male population [theoretically] liable to military service in the vast Russian Empire on 1 January 1910, was 74,262,600 men’.64
Thanks to corruption and privilege, millions of men simply did not serve. Knox also remarked that 75 per cent of recruits were drawn from the peasant class, which made poor soldiers. The Tatar-Mongol domination of Russia and the subsequent institution of serfdom – which had only been abolished a half-century before – had robbed them ‘of all natural initiative, leaving only a wonderful capacity for patient endurance’. As to their training, he wrote:
Since 1911, when I was appointed in St Petersburg, I had always attended the annual manoeuvres of the Military District, where accredited foreign officers were invited as guests of the Tsar. We lunched and dined at his table, used his motor-cars, rode his horses, and attended with him nightly performances at the local theatre. We saw much martial spectacle, but very little serious training for modern war.65
Russian conscripts looked like the illiterate peasants most of them were in civilian life, wearing baggy drawstring trousers under a short, belted smock with soft uniform cap. In summer, to save carrying a greatcoat – little wheeled transport was available or, indeed, usable in the roadless wastes – the soldier’s blanket was rolled up with ends tied together and worn bandolier-style over the left shoulder, leaving the right arm free for the rifle – if he had one. The output of the state rifle factory at Tula in 1914 was five – repeat, five – rifles per day although the factory was tooled up to produce 5,000 a month. Many conscripts had to drill with a broomstick and were ordered into battle with a pocketful of bullets and instructions to pick up and use the rifle of the first dead man they stumbled over. In retreat, Russian officers tended to sacrifice men to save artillery, which was considered more valuable than peasant lives.
As to infantry weapons, most of the issued rifles were Vintovka Mosina – a Russian design, but made in Belgium with a magazine holding five rounds.66 It was wildly inaccurate when used by raw recruits. There were also single-shot black-powder rifles dating from 1870 that had been re-machined in Belgium to use smokeless ammunition of the same calibre as the Mosin-Nagants and accept the same bayonets. There were also 450,000 obsolete French single-shot black-powder rifles, a half-million M1891s from the Manufacture Nationale, 400,000 obsolete three-shot Italian repeating rifles, 800,000 Arisaka rifles from Japan, plus 3.5 million rifles ordered from Remington and Westinghouse in the USA and 300,000 model 1895 Winchester repeaters, of which total some 1.6 million were delivered before the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Given the inefficiency of re-supply, such a wide variety of different bores meant that infantry units often received the wrong ammunition and could not fire a shot.
In all the Russian armies there were only 4,000 machine guns, many lacking wheels for rapid movement in advance or retreat, when they had to be carried. The situation of the artillery was almost as chaotic. Russia’s backwardness in heavy engineering had obliged War Minister Vladimir Sukhomlinov to purchase from the German firm Krupp its 120mm quick-firing light howitzers and 150mm howitzers from the French company Schneider-Creusot,67 but the seven divisions of heavy artillery had not finished training on them when the war began.
In contrast, each German division on the Russian fronts had its own heavy and medium artillery and Austro-Hungary had the benefit of excellent guns produced in the Škoda Iron Works in Bohemia. There was similar disparity in shells; OHL issued 3,000 shells per gun, but Russian ordnance provided only 1,000 shells per gun at the declaration of war and could manufacture only 1.5 shells per gun per day thereafter – a grotesquely inadequate situation when artillery bombardments prior to a major offensive could exceed 700 rounds per gun per day. As historian Timothy Dowling points out in a very comprehensive examination of the situation, two out of every three shells emerging from the barrel of a Russian gun were imported – as were two-thirds of the bullets fired by Russian small arms. Both Col Knox and French Ambassador Maurice Paléologue commented that the 5 million men mobilised were equipped with only 1.2 million rifles in the front lines and 700,000 in reserve. The shortage of armaments was echoed in the insufficiency of just about every kind of ancillary equipment. Typically, Samsonov’s 150,000-strong 2nd Army disposed of just ten motorcars, four motorcycles and twenty-five telephones. For the first months of the war Russian artillery brigades had no telephones, so that requests for their supporting fire arrived by Cossack despatch riders on sweating ponies. Morse operators and their transmitting sets were in short supply. Russian military transportation was also inadequate. Officers rode everywhere; the soldiers had to march, in some cases for hundreds of miles from the nearest railhead to the front, where they were thrown immediately into combat.
Summing up that disparity in training and equipment of the two sides on the Russian fronts, that coolly detached observer of the Russian war machine Colonel Knox reported: ‘For a long war, Russia was outclassed in every factor of success except in the number of her fighting men and their mollusc-like quality of recovery after severe defeat.’68
Israel Gelfand had swallowed whatever socialist beliefs he held to make a fortune as an arms dealer in the Balkan wars69 and was now writing for German left-wing periodicals under the sobriquet Parvus. Persona non grata in both Russia and Germany, he wrote a memorandum dated 9 March 1915 setting out at considerable length the methods of using the expatriate Russian dissidents to create the maximum social and political unrest in their homeland, leading to an early withdrawal of the Romanov empire from the war.70 To convert the Bolsheviks’ minuscule membership into a forceful powerbase required what would today be called ‘spin’ in a very expensive public relations campaign. Back in Berlin, Stinnes and Warburg had been talking with the politicians, with the result that, in January 1915, Germany’s Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Arthur Zimmermann, was arranging a German passport for Gelfand, his strategy considered so urgent that on 26 March Zimmermann ‘requested’ from the Imperial Treasury a subsidy for the Bolsheviks of 2 million gold marks, as negotiated by Gelfand/Parvus. Arrangements were made to pay this via deniable middlemen to subsidise the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks inside Russia.71 In May Gelfand met Lenin to compare notes but although Lenin, as usual, rejected anyone else’s ideas, Gelfand pressed on with his design.
On 9 July Zimmermann’s boss Gottlieb von Jagow upped this budget to 5 million marks. In talks with Gelfand and other intermediaries, Stinnes reportedly offered 2 million roubles of his own money to subsidise anti-war propaganda in Russia and Warburg also allocated substantial funds for ‘publishing activities’ there.72 The Bolsheviks sought these generous subsidies because they needed to bombard the uncommitted 99 per cent of the Russian population with propaganda if they were to have anything like sufficient support to stage a coup d’état. Despite the high cost of scarce newsprint in Russia, their covert financial backing enabled them to produce no less than forty-one daily and periodical publications that promised land to the dispossessed, food to the hungry and peace to those yearning for an end to the killing. In a massive PR campaign to make themselves respectable and popular, they commenced hammering away at public opinion with the simplest of slogans – none of which were overtly Marxist.73
A 27-year-old English governess working in Moscow, Florence Farmborough volunteered to serve as a krestovaya sestra – a Red Cross nurse in a letuchka or field dressing station. In those days when delay in treating any wound often meant death from infection, the letuchki were set up very near the front lines, moving frequently to keep up with advances and retreats. After a few weeks’ training in a civilian hospital, she spent a whole month travelling by railway to reach the south-western front in the Carpathian foothills early in 1915, and kept a diary whenever she had time to write. Her first base was in a well-built house with several pleasant, airy rooms, where the nurses’ first task was to scrub every surface clean and paint or whitewash the walls. An operating theatre was set up and a pharmacy stocked with medicines and surgical material. They were told not to think they would be there long: the stay might be six months or six hours, depending on the movement of the front. By chatting with the wounded men, she gained insights into the cares and preoccupations of the ordinary Russian soldier:
Lately, ammunition had been sent in large quantities to our Front, but little of it has been any use. Out of one consignment of 30,000 shells, fewer than 200 were found to be serviceable. Cartridges were sent in their hundreds of thousands and distributed among the men in their trenches, but they were of a foreign cast [sic] and would not fit the Russian rifle. Large stores of Japanese rifles had been despatched to neighbouring divisions, but the Russian cartridges [supplied there] failed to fit them.74