Chapter 4
1914: The First World War Starts Here
In This Chapter
Watching the excitement – and the reticence – over going to war
Getting up close and personal with the armies of 1914
Reaching stalemate in the west
Meeting triumph and tragedy in the east
The First World War started the way wars usually do – with young men forming up in smart new uniforms and marching off through cheering crowds.
By the end of 1914 the war had become something that no one had anticipated. It had cost every combatant country thousands more casualties than they’d ever expected – the French had lost over half a million men; the British nearly 90,000 (in fact, the British Expeditionary Force had virtually ceased to exist) – and on both fronts the war was deadlocked. In the west both sides were stuck in an immense line of trenches that ran without a break from the Belgian coast to the borders of Switzerland, and they had no clear idea of how to get out. Absolutely key was heavy artillery, for blasting a way through the enemy lines, but by the end of the year the armies on both sides were beginning to run out of shells.
The war was definitely not going according to plan and would certainly not be over by Christmas, as many people had expected. This chapter looks at how the first months of the war unfolded, and how this situation came to be.
The War You’ve All Been Waiting for – Must End by Christmas!
Before 1914 Europeans talked about a war breaking out – and the international tensions of those years (Chapter 3 outlines them) made some people think that a war would be like a welcome storm breaking up a spell of particularly heavy weather – but they hadn’t necessarily given much thought to what sort of war it would be. Most people expected a sort of massive international boxing final, where the two sides would spar for a while before one side knocked the other one out; it was just a question of which side it would be. The whole thing, most people thought, might last three months and be over by Christmas.
Hurrah, lads, we’re off to war!
In 1914 every European Great Power except Great Britain operated a system of military conscription (where ordinary people are compulsorily enlisted in military service): all young men had to serve for two or three years in the army, followed by a longer period in the reserve. Military training was about getting physically fit and learning to march, to scale a wall, to fire a rifle and to use the bayonet, and to these young men across Europe the chance to go off and do it all for real felt like an exciting adventure.
The situation was slightly different in Britain, which only had a small regular army plus the Territorial Army – part-time soldiers who combined some weekend military training with their day jobs. But Britons were as keen as anyone else to put on a soldier’s uniform and prove their manliness on the battlefield. That’s why the photos from Britain show huge crowds outside recruiting offices (see Figure 1 in the insert section): in Britain, if you wanted to be part of the war, you needed to join the army first, and fast – or you’d miss your chance. Or so everyone thought.
But was everyone really so happy?
One of the most puzzling things to modern minds about the outbreak of the First World War is that so many people seemed so happy about it (see Figure 4-1). Usually, nowadays people regard the outbreak of war as a tragedy, but if you look at photos taken in 1914 in the major European capitals, you see huge, excited crowds and soldiers marching off to war with a smile and a wave. But not everyone was as happy about going to war as the photos suggest.
The people who gathered in town squares (see Figure 2 in the insert section) to cheer at the news were the ones who were excited about it, but elsewhere, especially in the countryside, reactions were mixed. In the French countryside, for example, older people gloomily recalled the last time the French had fought the Germans, back in 1870, and that it hadn’t gone well at all. Those photos of cheering crowds aren’t wrong: they just don’t tell the whole story.
© Imperial War Museums (Q 81739)
Figure 4-1: German crowds cheering the Kaiser as Germany mobilises against Russia.
Haven’t We Met Before? The European Armies of 1914
The European states called themselves Great Powers because of their military strength, which, for most of them, meant their armies. Here, I look at just how strong those armies were. (Chapter 5 looks at how the navies and nascent air forces steamed in on the action.)
Austria-Hungary: Divided state, divided army
The army of the Dual Monarchy was the most ethnically mixed of all the combatants. This made for problems.
In charge: General Conrad von Hötzendorf – the man who had been so keen to crush Serbia when the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated back in June. A competent general, but no military genius.- Major strengths: The Austro-Hungarian army was perfectly competent but it was short of men and hampered by some serious weaknesses.
- Major weaknesses: The Austro-Hungarians couldn’t be sure how many fronts they’d need to fight on aside from Serbia in the south and Russia in the east; they worried that they might have to fight the Italians and the Romanians too. The second problem was that their army included Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, Italians, Slovenes, Bosniaks, Croats and so on, some of whom hated each other and couldn’t be trusted to co-operate. Some national groups, such as the Poles and Italians, would be fighting against their fellow countrymen in the enemy armies. So Austro-Hungarian commanders had to work out which troops they could safely place next to which, and opposite which enemies.
France: The state wary of its own army
The French army’s problem was politics: socialists saw it as a dangerously right-wing, anti-socialist and anti-semitic organisation whose generals would seize power unless they were very carefully watched. So the French would only come together for a defensive war or a war to liberate French territory, such as Alsace-Lorraine.
- In charge: General Joseph Joffre – a capable leader, shrewd and calm; a man who didn’t like to miss lunch and enjoyed long snoozes (see Figure 4-2). He wouldn’t panic, but he didn’t have the killer instinct either.
© Imperial War Museums (Q 70069)
Figure 4-2: French Commander-in-Chief General Joffre decorating a soldier.
- Major strengths: The French had a very good 75 millimetre field gun that could do a lot of damage when they deployed it properly. They also had some strong forts along the frontier with Germany.
- Major weaknesses: They didn’t have enough heavy artillery to back up their field gun. They also depended too heavily on those fortresses, which were going to prove deathtraps – for the men inside them.
Germany: The military state
Nowhere else in Europe did the military have the sort of decisive political influence they enjoyed in Germany.
- In charge: Chief of the General Staff Helmuth von Moltke. Although he was an intelligent man and had a good grasp of modern warfare, von Moltke was a worrier and inclined to panic in a crisis. Soon replaced by the more decisive Erich von Falkenhayn.
Major strengths: The German army was well equipped with machine guns, howitzers (short-nozzled artillery guns that could lob shells high in the air – very good for dealing with fortifications) and spades for digging in. The German railway system had lines leading from east to west so the Germans could easily transfer troops from one front to the other.- Major weaknesses: The Germans had long thought that a war on two fronts would be a disaster for Germany; they were right.
Great Britain: Professional, but small
Britain was the only European Great Power not to have conscription (Chapter 12 explains why), which made its situation rather different. The army on the Western Front, known simply as the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), was highly professional but much smaller than the armies of the other Great Powers. The BEF in 1914 (see the sidebar, ‘Who are you calling contemptible?’) had two main sorts of soldiers:
- Regulars were the men of Britain’s famous and ancient regiments, such as the Grenadier Guards or the Royal Fusiliers, and of the regiments recruited from, and named after, the different counties of Britain.
- Territorials were volunteer, part-time soldiers. The Regulars were rather scornful of them, but Territorials proved very tough fighters in battle.
These soldiers were soon joined by the citizen soldiers of Kitchener’s New Army (see the sidebar, ‘A little moral blackmail goes a very long way’) – men who were only intending to serve in the army until the war was over, when they could go back to civilian life, and a very different type of soldier from the experienced Tommies of the professional British army. The citizen soldiers would greatly swell the army’s size. Britain could also call on the considerable military forces of its colonies and dominions – and it did.
- In charge: The commander of the BEF was Sir John French (see Figure 4-3), who had made a name for himself as an aggressive cavalry commander in the Anglo–Boer War. He hadn’t commanded a whole army before, though, and despite his name he didn’t speak French and didn’t like the French much either. Which was a bit of a shame because the French were his allies.
© Imperial War Museums (Q 70032)
Figure 4-3: Sir John French reviewing army volunteers in Hyde Park, London, in 1914.
- Major strengths: The BEF was highly professional. It was expert at using the terrain, and with a firing rate of 15 rounds a minute, the British were the best marksmen of all the armies of 1914. They also deployed their highly experienced Indian troops in France and other troops from the British Empire. Troops from Britain’s overseas dominions, Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, proved some of the toughest troops the Germans encountered.
- Major weaknesses: The BEF was small. Bismarck joked that if the British army ever landed in Germany, he would send the local police force to arrest it. The British were recruiting fast (see the sidebar, ‘A little moral blackmail goes a very long way’), but they’d need at least a year to get the new recruits trained and ready for combat.
Russia: Huge army, huge problems
The Russian army had broken Napoleon a hundred years earlier, but it had been disastrously led and heavily defeated in the war with Japan in 1904–5.
- In charge: The Grand Duke Nicholas, the Tsar’s uncle. In reality, the military headquarters (the Stavka) were too far away to control events and key Russian commanders were the generals in charge on each front.
- Major strengths: The Russians’ biggest advantage was the sheer number of men they had: more than the German and Austro-Hungarian armies combined. After their defeat against the Japanese, the Russians had started reorganising their army, and although the programme was far from finished in 1914, the Russian army was already much better organised and equipped than it had been ten years earlier.
- Major weaknesses: The Russian railway and communications system was chaotic, and that would affect the troops’ supplies of essentials such as food, warm clothing and ammunition – not to mention moving troops around and bringing in reinforcements. They also lacked a decent system for sending messages in code.
Wrestling for the West
The war began with movements on both the Western and Eastern Fronts. However, all hopes for a quick victory were centred on the Western Front.
Germany’s dilemma, and the not-so-clever Schlieffen Plan
The Germans were pretty sure that they couldn’t win a war on two fronts, against France in the west and Russia in the east. Bismarck had devoted all his diplomatic skill to avoiding that situation, and now his successors had blundered into exactly what he’d tried to avoid. They needed to keep one front on hold while they concentrated on the other one. But which?
‘Westerners’ within the German high command argued that France and especially Britain were Germany’s most dangerous enemies and that Germany should concentrate on crushing them. They argued that war with Russia wasn’t strictly necessary. ‘Easterners’, on the other hand, thought that Russia was a dangerous enemy that would crush Germany if it could, so Germany should concentrate its forces in the east.
The solution to the Germans’ dilemma seemed to lie in the Schlieffen Plan – the plan devised by Count von Schlieffen, the former head of the German General Staff, to knock France out of the war hard and fast by going around French border defences and sweeping down through Belgium and around the west of Paris, so the Germans could then concentrate their efforts on fighting the Russians before the Russians had time to get themselves ready.
For some reason, you can still meet people who speak in awe of the Schlieffen Plan, as if it was one of the best military plans in history. It wasn’t. It was riddled with flaws, so much so that the Germans themselves had been tinkering with it ever since it was drawn up. The big problems with Count Schlieffen’s famous plan were as follows:
- Keeping troops in line as they wheeled in huge numbers through Belgium and around the west of Paris was almost impossible. You try it with a line of people – and that’s without a hostile army trying to stop you. Schlieffen was always going on about how important it was to keep the right wing of the attack strong, but this was easier said than done: the troops on the extreme right had so far to go that it would be difficult to keep in touch with them and keep them supplied. Moreover, von Moltke was worried about leaving the left wing too weak, so he altered the plan to take troops from the right wing and position them on the left. But without enough troops on the right, would the Germans be able to get around the west of Paris at all?
- Forgetting about Paris was an error. Paris was a major military centre, yet Schlieffen seems to have thought that the French troops stationed there would simply sit still and let the Germans move around them. Not very likely!
The most vulnerable parts of an army are the two ends of the line – the flanks. If you think of an army marching past you, you see that the troops nearest you are facing the wrong way to be able to fire back if you attack them, and when they do turn to face you, they can’t deploy anything like as many men as they could if you were attacking from the front. For that reason, officers all around the world were taught never to present their flank to the enemy. Yet that is exactly what the Schlieffen Plan did: as the Germans swept past Paris, they’d be presenting their flank to the troops stationed in Paris. Maybe the Germans thought the French wouldn’t notice. If so, they were wrong. - Overlooking Britain was a mistake. Schlieffen had talked airily of invading Belgium even though it was common knowledge that Britain would never allow a major power to occupy Belgium. Even if France was beaten, Britain’s navy could blockade the German coast, cut off supplies and sink German shipping, and Britain could gather its own army and its formidable colonial troops to launch an attack on Germans in Belgium or France whenever it chose. The Schlieffen Plan was meant to resolve the problem of a war on two fronts, but by bringing Britain into the war, it actually made a war on two fronts virtually certain.
- Underestimating Russia was fatal. Schlieffen considered Russia to be so disorganised that it would take weeks or months to get its army into position. That meant the Germans could deal quickly with the French in the west and then turn east, to the Russians. (The Germans were vague on how they would beat the Russians, but figured no doubt they’d think of something.) This was a crazy scheme even when Schlieffen came up with it. After all, if your enemy is disorganised, that’s the time to attack him. You don’t wait around until he’s ready for you! But in any case, in the time since Schlieffen had drawn up his plans the Russians had made major improvements in their military organisation and would be ready more quickly than Schlieffen had thought possible.
Ultimately, the Russians invaded German territory first, not vice versa, which from the word go deprived the Germans of their hopes of beating France before heading east and made them revise their plans – again.
Apart from all that, the Schlieffen Plan was a really good idea.
Any idea how to win this war by Christmas?
The biggest problem with Germany’s Schlieffen Plan was that it wasn’t a plan to win the war; it was a plan to win part of the war. Much the same was true of the plans of the other combatants:
- Belgium: The Belgians didn’t really have a plan except to stop the Germans taking over their country, or at least slow them down. Somehow.
- Britain: The British war plan was to send the BEF to France to fit in with the French plans, whatever they might be. Because the French hadn’t included the BEF in their plans and were planning to invade Germany, not Belgium, fitting in with the French plans while pushing the Germans out of Belgium wasn’t going to be easy.
- France: Plan XVII. The French were the only ones on the Allied side who had a war plan as such and theirs was quite simple: gather along the border with Germany, move into Alsace and Lorraine (the two former French regions the Germans had annexed in 1871) and liberate them. The French hoped the Germans would then give up and go home. No, it wasn’t a realistic hope.
Soldiers of France, charge!
When the war began, the French launched Plan XVII. They wanted revenge for what the Germans had done to them back in 1871, and they’d do it wearing similar uniforms and using similar tactics as in 1871 too. Unfortunately for them, the Germans were living in 1914, not 1871. The French in their colourful uniforms made easy targets for German rifles and machine guns. The French charged at the German lines – and were slaughtered. By the end of August, the French had lost 260,000 casualties in the Battle of the Frontiers. Just a few weeks earlier these same men had been marching off to war through cheering crowds. What a difference a month makes in wartime.
The Battle of the Frontiers was a disaster for the French. Just to make it even worse, while they were charging to their deaths in front of German machine guns in Alsace-Lorraine, the German invasion of Belgium was going ominously well.
The Battle for Belgium
The Belgians were deeply shocked by the German invasion of their country. They knew that if war ever came, the Germans might come through Belgium, but they didn’t expect it to happen. On 2 August, though, the Germans invaded Luxembourg and sent the Belgians an ultimatum demanding free passage for their army or they’d occupy the whole country. King Albert rejected their demand and declared that Belgium would resist. The Belgian plan was quite simple:
- Hold the German advance up as long as possible.
This meant holding out in the strong border fortresses in Liège and Namur. It also meant ordinary Belgians should feel free to sabotage as they liked: destroying bridges and railway lines, or just letting the tyres down on German lorries.
- The Belgian army would then fall back on the port of Antwerp, up near the Dutch border.
Antwerp was strongly defended, and from there the Belgians could move out to wherever the army was needed.
Bravo, Belgium!
The sight of little Belgium standing up to the Germans struck a chord with many people in Britain. A famous cartoon showed Belgium as a young country lad, armed only with a thin stick, standing his ground against a large German, his pockets full of sausages and a German meerschaum pipe in his mouth, advancing on him and brandishing a great big club. Many British people didn’t understand the ins and outs of European diplomacy, but they did understand the idea of small country standing up to a big bully. The German invasion of Belgium undoubtedly helped encourage recruitment in Britain (see Figure 3 in the insert section).
Bring up Big Bertha!
The Germans’ first obstacle in Belgium was the city of Liège, which was surrounded by a ring of thick concrete forts. The Germans needed to take Liège quickly if they were to keep to the timetable of the Schlieffen Plan, but the forts were too strong. So the Germans brought up their big guns, huge howitzers known as Big Berthas, which were mounted on railway tracks. Big Berthas smashed through the concrete forts and blew them to bits. The Germans carried on into Belgium, taking Brussels, sending a force up towards Antwerp and then heading south towards the French frontier. Everything seemed to be going to plan.
General von Kluck has problems …
General von Kluck was the man in command of the German first army. His job was to sweep through Belgium and northern France and go round the far side of Paris. But he wasn’t happy because he didn’t have enough men for it: he had to set up garrisons in Belgium, and then he had to detach a large number of men to go up and threaten Antwerp, not to mention the men he was losing in battle. To make things worse, von Moltke had transferred two whole corps (that’s like two whole armies) from the Western Front over to the east because he was worried the Russians were going to break through. All these problems would only get worse the farther von Kluck went.
And then, on Sunday 23 August, near the Belgian town of Mons, von Kluck’s men ran into deadly accurate rifle fire from an enemy they just couldn’t see. The Germans lost 5,000 men that day, three times as many casualties as they were able to inflict on the unseen enemy. The unseen enemy was the BEF (see Figure 4-4).
© Imperial War Museums (Q 53320)
Figure 4-4: Well-concealed British troops firing at advancing Germans. The BEF was small but highly professional.
… and so has Sir John French
Sir John French, the leader of the BEF, also had problems. His instructions were to co-operate with the French but not to take orders from them: the BEF was an independent command and his orders would come from London. Moreover, because the BEF was so small, Sir John was under strict instructions to avoid heavy casualties. This was easier said than done.
The French commander in northern France and Belgium was General Charles Lanrezac. Lanrezac didn’t have enough troops in his sector because Joffre didn’t believe the Germans would attack through Belgium and wouldn’t send him any. So when Sir John sent the BEF forward into Belgium, Lanrezac wasn’t able to send many French troops with them. When the Germans started pouring through Belgium, Lanrezac was worried his men would be cut off and he gave the order to withdraw, which meant that the BEF would have to pull out too. That was when the problems began.
The man leading the BEF troops in Belgium was a fiery veteran of the Zulu and Boer Wars, Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien. He couldn’t stand Sir John French (the feeling was mutual) and he didn’t think much of being ordered to retreat, especially after his men had done so well at Mons. He fell back to the town of Le Cateau where he turned and fought, in defiance of Sir John’s orders. It was probably the right thing to do: it certainly held the Germans up and gave some of the BEF a chance to get away. But it cost the British nearly 8,000 men. And afterwards Smith-Dorrien had to retreat again.
The British had to retreat a long way from Mons, back through northern France and down to the River Marne, east of Paris. One regiment had to cover over 200 miles on foot in just 13 days. To make things worse, the weather was boiling hot. And, of course, the Germans were hard on their heels. By September, as the exhausted BEF drew close to Paris, Sir John French reckoned the time had come to pull them out of the line and give them a rest. Unfortunately for him, General Joffre had other ideas.
The battle for Paris
By September 1914 everyone seemed to be converging on Paris. General Joffre was gathering troops to defend the French capital, while the Germans were moving in from Belgium in the north. Joffre wanted to put the BEF into the defensive line he was preparing along the River Marne, but Sir John French thought they needed rest after the long retreat from Mons (see the preceding section). Joffre appealed to the British government and Lord Kitchener came over to Paris and gave Sir John a dressing down: Sir John would have to do what the French wanted him to do. So the British took their place alongside the French and waited for the Germans to arrive. Meanwhile, the French government packed up and headed for the distant safety of Bordeaux. It seemed nothing could save Paris from disaster. And then something very strange happened: the Germans went the wrong way.
It says ‘No Left Turns’, General von Kluck!
General von Kluck was supposed to take his men around the back (that is, the west side) of Paris, but the closer he got to the city, the more convinced he was that he just didn’t have enough men to do it. So he changed the plan. Instead, he gave the order to turn left and pass to the east – that is, in front of Paris. Which meant he was presenting his flank to the enemy, the one thing generals were supposed never to do (see the earlier section ‘Germany’s dilemma, and the not-so-clever Schlieffen Plan’ to find out why). This was the French army’s chance to attack.
The mystery of the Battle of the Marne
Two French generals saw their chance when von Kluck turned left: General Joffre, in charge of the whole French army, and General Galliéni, who was in charge of the garrison in Paris. They had to move quickly: Galliéni even requisitioned a fleet of 500 Parisian taxis to rush some of his troops out to the front along the River Marne. The resulting Battle of the Marne was crucial: if the Allies lost, the Germans would take Paris and the war in the west would be over. The French put up a fierce fight, but so did the Germans. And then another strange thing happened: the Germans suddenly gave up and retreated. Why? It was all very mysterious.
What happened was that the German commander, von Moltke, got cold feet. He was already nervous about the war Germany had taken on and appalled at the heavy German losses; he didn’t like the sound of the way things were going in France one bit. So he sent a staff officer, Colonel Hentsch, to the Marne to have a look at what was happening and report back. Hentsch reckoned that if the British crossed the Marne, the Germans would be in danger of being cut in two and surrounded, and they’d need to get out quickly. German aerial reconnaissance confirmed that the British had indeed crossed the river (and met no resistance), and so von Moltke gave the order to retreat. The French could breathe again: Paris was saved.
Dig in for victory – the trenches
The Germans didn’t retreat in disorder from the Marne; far from it. They headed for carefully prepared positions above the River Aisne, which runs parallel to the Marne a few miles to the north. The Germans had dug some strong trenches in the high, chalky ground from where they could fire at anyone coming at them from the south. The British tried to dislodge them but found it harder than it looked. The key to success in this sort of fighting was heavy artillery and the British didn’t have enough of it. Never mind, they thought; they could always work their way around the Germans’ flank.
Working your way around the enemy’s flank was a bit like attacking your enemy’s flank (see ‘Germany’s dilemma, and the not-so-clever Schlieffen Plan’ for more on this manoeuvre): it put your enemy at a serious disadvantage and meant you could attack him from both sides at once. The trick was to get into position to do it, but if you could manage that, the battle – possibly even the war – was as good as yours.
Unfortunately, when the British tried to work their way around the German flank, they found that the Germans were now trying to do the same to them.
Head them off at the pass!
Before long, the British found that they were needed elsewhere – in Belgium – so they slipped away and left the French and German armies to work their way around each others’ flanks. But every time one side made a move, the other side blocked it. As each attempt at flanking failed, each side dug themselves into trenches, so as not to lose the ground they did hold. And so, bit by bit, each side was building a line of trenches along the whole length of the Western Front.
No one was expecting to spend the war in these trenches. Trenches were temporary shelters where troops could get a breather in relative safety before emerging in a great wave to overwhelm the enemy. Each side thought they would spend a short time in their trenches and then get moving again. They were quite dumbfounded when they found that doing so wasn’t going to be so easy.
Head for the coast!
As the line of trenches grew, the Allies had a new worry: if the Germans reached the coast and took the Channel Ports, such as Calais and Dunkirk, they could make it very difficult for Britain to send supplies and troops back and forth across the Channel. So the two sides embarked on what became known as the race to the sea, building trenches as they went. Now, all eyes were on Belgium again:
- Antwerp: The Belgians held out, helped by a British naval brigade, but the Germans destroyed the Belgian forts one by one and the British and Belgians had to evacuate the town. The Belgians headed south; the British were mostly interned in Holland.
- Ostend: The Germans took this important Channel port. But would they be able to take the others – Dunkirk and Calais?
- The sluices: The Belgians stopped the Germans taking the coastal area of Flanders, south of Ostend, by opening the sluice gates and flooding the whole area. The Germans had to dig in farther north.
Flooding the land in Flanders was a good way to stop the Germans taking it, but it was a reminder of how wet the area is. It only takes a bit of heavy rain to start a flood, and if the ground is churned up by shelling, it can become a quagmire. As both sides would find out.
- Ypres: Everything now depended on this medieval market town in southern Belgium that stood between the Germans and the Channel ports. The British held it. The Germans had to take it.
The bloody First Battle of Ypres
Ypres was very difficult for the British to hold because it was located in a salient, which means that the front line bulged out in front of the town: not a comfortable place to be, because the enemy can fire at you from three sides. The 1914 Battle of Ypres (the first of three before the war was over, though they didn’t know that then) was very bloody on both sides. The Germans poured troops in, including a regiment of freshly trained college students, 25,000 of whom were slaughtered in front of the village of Langemarck by the deadly rifle fire the British were getting a reputation for. The Germans called this disaster the ‘Massacre of the Innocents at Ypres’.
In many ways the British might have been better off letting the Germans take the town and falling back to a strong, entrenched position without having to sit in a dangerous salient. But holding on to Ypres had become a matter of honour for the British: they felt that if they lost Ypres, it meant they’d lost the war. It was also about the only corner of Belgium they still held – and after all, they’d come into the war to liberate Belgium. So the Brits held on to Ypres for dear life and they managed to stop the Germans taking the town. Just. But the Germans would be back.
Tragedy on the Eastern Front
In the east the Russian army was so vast it was nicknamed ‘the Russian Steamroller’, meaning that, in theory, it just needed to move forward and it would crush everything in its path. And, at first, it did. Before the Germans could invade Russian territory in Poland, two Russian armies moved into East Prussia, and when the Germans tried to stop them at a town called Gumbinnen, the Russians beat them. This was definitely not in the German war plan.
Behold the titans of Tannenberg
Von Moltke sacked the German general who lost at Gumbinnen and replaced him with one of the most successful double acts in military history. Paul von Hindenburg was a decorated veteran brought out of retirement (he’d put on a bit of weight, so his old uniform didn’t quite fit him any more). He was experienced, shrewd and calm. His Chief of Staff and right-hand man was General Erich Ludendorff, a much more excitable character – hysterical, even – but a very able commander, with ruthless drive and energy. The two men were very different, which is probably why they worked so well together. They would need to, because two Russian armies were now steadily advancing into eastern Germany towards the Baltic coast.
The two Russian commanders were General von Rennenkampf (in the north) and General Samsonov (in the south). Unlike Hindenburg and Ludendorff, they didn’t make a good double act. In fact, they couldn’t stand each other. They didn’t communicate with each other much, and even when they did, the Russians sent their messages by ordinary radio without any attempt to put them in code, so the Germans just listened in and took notes.
Instead of moving against both Russian armies, Hindenburg concentrated all his forces against Samsonov in the south and left Rennenkampf alone for the moment. Of course, Rennenkampf could’ve come to Samsonov’s rescue, but the Germans reckoned he’d leave Samsonov to stew in his own juice – and they were right. Samsonov’s men were cut off in small groups, no one knew what was happening or what they should be doing, and General Samsonov was so devastated by his defeat that he shot himself.
Next, Hindenburg and Ludendorff turned against Rennenkampf and trapped his army against the Masurian Lakes. The Russians suffered terrible losses, including many who drowned trying to get away across the lakes. The Russian invasion of Germany had started in triumph but ended in disaster.
The defeats at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes didn’t spell the end of the Russian army, though. As the Germans started to push the Russians back out of Germany and into Poland, the Russians fought back, and by the end of the year both sides were back more or less where they’d started.
The news wasn’t all bad for the Russians in 1914: farther south, against the Austro-Hungarians, they were doing very well.
New man, new priorities
By September 1914 the Chief of the German General Staff, General von Moltke, was convinced that the war would be a disaster for Germany. The Schlieffen Plan had failed (see Figure 4-5) and now, von Moltke thought, Germany was trapped in a long war that it couldn’t win. He couldn’t face it and he suffered a mental breakdown. The man who took over was Erich von Falkenhayn. Falkenhayn had a very clear understanding of the war:
- Germany’s most deadly enemy was not France or Russia, but Britain.
- Therefore, the priority should be the Western Front, not the Eastern.
- Germany should try to make a separate peace with one or more of Britain’s allies.
- Of all Britain’s allies, the one most likely to make a separate peace (and possibly even become a German ally in due course) was Russia.
Falkenhayn didn’t want to send too many troops to the Eastern Front (and he refused to send any there from the Western Front), and he certainly didn’t want to launch the sort of full-scale invasion of Russia that General Ludendorff talked about. Falkenhayn’s attitude was infuriating for Hindenburg and Ludendorff, who thought the Eastern Front should have priority over the Western one. It was even worse news for the Austro-Hungarians.
Figure 4-5: (a) Germany’s Schlieffen Plan, and France’s Plan XVII, and (b) what actually happened.
General Conrad’s dilemma
The Austro-Hungarian commander, General Conrad, had wanted a war against Serbia as soon as Franz Ferdinand was shot (see Chapter 3). Conrad talked with von Moltke and they agreed that the Germans and the Austro-Hungarians would each invade Russian territory in Poland. Conrad’s war with the Serbs would have to wait. But then everything started going wrong. The Russians invaded East Prussia and beat the Germans at Gumbinnen, and von Moltke had to pull out of the joint attack on Russia. If Conrad decided to go ahead with the attack on Russia, he’d be on his own.
Conrad now found himself facing a difficult dilemma. The Austro-Hungarian army ought to be able to beat the Serbs, but it couldn’t take the Russians on without German help. His options were:
- Attack Serbia and forget about the Russians. Not a good idea, unless Conrad wanted the Russian steamroller moving unopposed into Austria-Hungary (he didn’t).
- Attack the Russians and forget about the Serbs. This option made more military sense, but little political sense: the whole point of going to war in the first place had been to teach the Serbs a lesson, after all.
- Attack the Russians and the Serbs. Attacking both was possible in theory, but because it would mean splitting the Austro-Hungarian forces between two fronts, it would probably mean losing on both fronts too.
Conrad decided that the Austro-Hungarians would go it alone and invade Russian Poland and attack Serbia as well, without German help. So there. But he didn’t have enough men to defeat either foe. The war in the east had hardly started and already Austria-Hungary seemed to have lost it.
You mean you can’t even beat the Serbs?
Conrad gave General Potiorek the job of leading the Austro-Hungarian invasion of Serbia. Unfortunately, he didn’t give Potiorek anything like enough men to do the job (partly because Conrad needed men for his campaign in Russian Poland). As a result Potiorek was driven back, and instead of the Austro-Hungarians invading Serbia, the Serbs invaded Bosnia-Herzegovina. Potiorek had another go later in December and he did briefly take the Serbian capital, Belgrade. But he had to give it up again. Potiorek had lost 24,000 men and he still hadn’t beaten the Serbs.
The epic Siege of Przemysl
General Conrad decided to press ahead with his invasion of Russian Poland without German help. He gathered his troops and headed for the city of Lemberg (the German name for the city of Lvov). He didn’t have enough men to take it, and the Russians completely defeated him. Conrad was furious with the Germans for not helping him (and they were furious with him for losing) and he fell back to his headquarters in the town of Przemysl. The Russians moved in to besiege the town.
The Siege of Przemysl was an epic. It lasted all through the winter of 1914 and into the spring of 1915. Both sides suffered terribly: the Russians were in rags by the end of it and hardly in better condition than their enemy.
War comes to Warsaw
Even a ‘westerner’ like Chief of the German General Staff Falkenhayn couldn’t entirely ignore the Eastern Front. So after the German victory at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes (see ‘Behold the titans of Tannenberg’), he agreed that Hindenburg and Ludendorff should join the Austro-Hungarians in a joint attack on Warsaw. Unfortunately for them, the Russians attacked first, the Austro-Hungarians messed up their part of the counter-attack and they all had to turn around and go home.
The Germans weren’t impressed with their Austro-Hungarian allies.