5
EAST PRUSSIA
The religion of Muscovite imperialism is primitive and medieval, literally half barbaric. Its peasant and national culture belong overwhelmingly to the same inferior category - if they are not wholly and purely Asiatic ... Not only the perceptions of law, but also all morality and all social feeling belong to a backward west and central Asian type, not a European one ... Therefore France’s and Britain’s alliance with Russia against Germany and Austria-Hungary is an alliance not only against Germany and Austria-Hungary, but also against the inseparable joint life interests of all Europe.1
These words, published in 1915, are those not of a German but of a Swede, not of a conservative but of a socialist. However, in 1914 they were sentiments which both rallied Germans of all political persuasions and convinced them that they were in the vanguard of civilisation. Socialists and trade unionists might feel beleaguered in Germany, but they knew that they would suffer far more under the heel of tsarist autocracy. The defence of what they had gained for the working class, both politically and materially, now required them to protect the nation. When the German Socialist Party met on 3 August 1914 to discuss its stance on the war, the time for prevarication was past. Germany was already at war with Russia and France. It resolved to vote in the Reichstag in favour of war credits. It hoped that, by opting for collusion rather than confrontation with the Reich, it would secure constitutional reform, but its decision was unconditional.
The plight of peasants in East Prussia justified the socialists’ stance. Although the Russian cavalry proved inept in its reconnaissance, in mid-August its leading formations pushed into German territory. One of its officers, Vladimir Littauer, later admitted, ‘The scene on the German side of the border was ... frightening. For miles, farms, haystacks, and barns were burning ... Like every army under the sun, we looted and destroyed, and later hated to admit it.’2 On 23 August Max Hoffmann, chief of operations with the German 8th Army, wrote in his diary: ‘There has never been such a war as this, and never will be again - waged with such bestial fury’.3 On the same day refugees arrived in Berlin with reports ‘of heads being cut off, children being burned, women raped’.4 As in the case of atrocities in Belgium, rumour and then propaganda ran ahead of reality, but the reports from East Prussia rested on less secure foundations. After the war the Germans’ official history claimed that within four weeks the Russians had killed 1,620 civilians, but in 1915 they themselves had put the figure as no higher than 101. Moreover, there is no evidence that, in this invasion, unlike those of Belgium and Serbia, the high command deliberately used terror in a pre-emptive strike against civilian resistance. ‘The wish of the Tsar of all the Russias’, the commander of the Russian 1st Army, Paul Rennenkampf, instructed, ‘is to take care of the peaceful inhabitants’. 5 However, the supply arrangements of the Russians had been neglected before the war and collapsed as soon as they started their advance. They subsisted by plundering, and what they could not take with them they destroyed. As elsewhere, mobile warfare generated its own horrors.
Call-up was more widely opposed in Russia than in any other country whose army was mobilised in 1914 Peasants worried about what would happen to their families and the land in their absence None the less, 96 per cent reported for duty
The Bosnian crisis of 1908-9 had convinced the Russians that the Austrians would not go to war without German support. But this belief did not resolve the issue of how to deploy their forces. When the Russians had first allied themselves with France, in 1890, they anticipated that the Germans would strike east first, before turning west. The French alliance would therefore guard Russia’s back while it dealt with Austria-Hungary. Russia’s defeat at the hands of Japan in 1904-5 and the subsequent revolution had two effects. First, it encouraged Russia to concentrate its forces in the heart of the country, so that it could confront threats in Asia as well as in Europe: Poland, Russia’s westernmost territory and vulnerable to envelopment by Germany from the north and by Austria-Hungary from the south, was abandoned. Second, Russian weakness permitted the German general staff to plan on striking France before it turned east to face Russia. The result was that the boot was now on the other foot: France needed Russia to hit Germany from the east as soon as possible so as to relieve the pressure in the west.
In 1911 the French general staff had asked the Russian army to attack the German army by the fifteenth day of mobilisation. The request was problematic. Russia had insufficient railway track in relation to its vast size to complete its mobilisation so quickly, especially given its abandonment of Poland. Moreover, the war plan it had adopted in 1910, although it was certainly weighted towards Germany rather than Austria-Hungary, was primarily defensive in orientation. Between 1910 and 1914 Russia increased the number of trains it could send westward from 250 a day to 360, but by the fifteenth day of the war only half the infantry was mobilised and no more than twenty-seven out of 114 divisions were concentrated. In 1912 the chief of staff of the Kiev military district, M. V Alekseyev, pointed out that the army of Austria-Hungary in Galicia was more beatable than that of Germany, and that Poland provided the opportunity to attack across the upper reaches of the Vistula against its flank and rear. But that assumed that the French would bear the strain against Germany. The result was compromise. The 1912 Russian war plan had two variants, Case A for Austria-Hungary using three armies (but in the event four) and Case G for Germany employing two armies. In 1914 both were implemented. Two more armies were kept in reserve, and in due course they gave rise to a third variant. Successes to the south against Austria-Hungary in Galicia and to the north against Germany in East Prussia would secure the flanks of Russia’s Polish salient. A thrust from Poland to Posen would open the most direct route to Berlin. This second stage was what would give unity to Case A and Case G, and it exerted a powerful pull on the Tsar’s lanky uncle, Grand Duke Nikolay, when he assumed the command of the armies on the outbreak of the war.
Geography intended the Russo-German frontier for defensive warfare, not offensive, and both sides had worked on that assumption. Russian defensive planning had deliberately left the area south of East Prussia devoid of roads and railways. But this was the way that the Russian 2nd Army now had to come as it aimed to envelop the German 8th Army and cut it off from its line of retreat across the lower Vistula. The Masurian lakes, which screened the central and south-eastern section of the frontier for over 100 km, separated the 2nd Army from its partner, the 1st Army, which was intended to fix the Germans frontally between the lakes and the fortified city of Königsberg (today’s Kaliningrad). As the 2nd Army advanced, its front extended to left and right - the left reaching deep into Germany and towards the Vistula, egged on by the aspirations of Grand Duke Nikolay’s third variant, and the right bidding to make contact with the 1st Army. The latter fought the Germans in defensive positions at Gumbinnen on the River Angerapp on 20 August, but Rennenkampf then paused to consolidate and resupply. The German 8th Army was free to break contact; by 23 August only a single cavalry division faced the Russian 1st Army.
The Germans prepared positions to strengthen the natural defences which the Masurian lakes gave East Prussia But their victories here were the product of manoeuvre
As he was fighting the battle of Gumbinnen, the commander of the German 8th Army, Maximilian Prittwitz und Gaffron, received an aerial reconnaissance report saying that elements of the Russian 2nd Army were in Mlawa. Prittwitz’s first reaction was panic. At 7 p.m. on the 20th he ordered the 8th Army to fall back on the Vistula. His response was ill calculated. The Russians were already closer to the Vistula than he was; he could not save the situation by retreat. Moreover, the territory that he proposed to give up was German; it ill behoved the much-vaunted German army to abandon its own citizens to Russian occupation. Prittwitz’s superior, the chief of the general staff, Moltke, had told him: ‘When the Russians come, not defence only, but offensive, offensive, offensive’.6
These instructions were not as absurd as the raw balance of forces suggested. The Germans had 158 battalions of infantry, 78 squadrons of cavalry and 774 guns to face a Russian force of 354 battalions, 331 squadrons and 1,428 guns. In addition, thanks to Manchuria, the Russian army had the advantage in recent combat experience: this was the first time the German army had been to war for over forty years. But East Prussia was where the German general staff had learnt its craft in staff rides and manoeuvres. It knew the ground, and Schlieffen had taught it that in a defensive battle the Masurian lakes provided the opportunity for operations on interior lines. In other words, the lakes would separate the Russians, while the railway network would allow the Germans to redeploy behind the lakes along the short chord from north-east to south-west. Max Hoffmann and Colonel Grunert, the 8th Army’s quartermaster, set out to persuade Prittwitz that, ‘it was necessary to stop the advance of the Warsaw [2nd] Army, and that the best way of doing this would be through an offensive thrust against the left wing of that army’.7 I Corps on the left wing of the German front at Gumbinnen should move by train to the right wing of XX Corps, which faced the Russian 2nd Army’s left; the other two corps at Gumbinnen should march directly westwards to the 2nd Army’s right wing. Prittwitz was won over, but his conversion was too late to save his career. Moltke’s headquarters at Koblenz had taken soundings with all Prittwitz’s corps commanders, none of whom favoured the retreat to the Vistula. Moltke therefore dismissed Prittwitz and his chief of staff. In their stead he appointed a retired veteran of the 1866 war against Austria, Paul von Hindenburg, now aged sixty-seven, and, as Hindenburg’s chief of staff, Erich Ludendorff. Ludendorff had been Moltke’s chief of operations, but had lost his job when his outspoken advocacy of full conscription had upset conservative sensibilities. He was bourgeois and careerist, and his allegiance was less to the Kaiser than to his own ambition. In Hoffmann’s estimation, ‘He is the right man for this business - ruthless and hard’.8
Ludendorff’s capacity for self-promotion had already secured him the credit for the fall of Liege. His own contribution had been the flamboyant seizure of the undefended citadel rather than of the forts that ringed it: the latter had ensured that Liege had held out five times longer than the forty-eight hours Ludendorff had predicted. Now luck favoured him once more. He inherited a manoeuvre which others had planned but which would bestow on Hindenburg and himself the victors’ laurels.
Not the least of Hindenburg’s functions — both now and throughout the war - was to settle the nerves of his anxious subordinate. Ludendorff was worried that Rennenkampf would resume his advance, and therefore delayed the departure of the two marching corps for a day. The effect was to lead the Russian 2nd Army on, broadening its front and deepening the sack into which it was plunging. General Aleksandr Samsonov, its commander, deprived of direct communication with Rennenkampf, and so unaware of his slowness, was buoyed by anticipation of success. On the evening of 26 August he invited the allies’ military attaches to dinner ‘and as we started sent back Postovski to get his sword, remarking that he was now in an enemy’s country and must be armed.... There was a dramatic incident in the middle of the meal. An officer brought in a telegram ... and said that the GOC 1st Corps wished to speak on the telephone with the Army Commander or the Chief of Staff. General Postovski put on his pince-nez, read the telegram, and he and General Samsonov buckled on their swords, said good-bye to the Commandant, and left at once.’9
Samsonov’s supper had been disturbed by reports of the arrival of the German I Corps on his left flank. Its commander had refused to obey Ludendorff’s order that he go into action on the morning of the 26th, so adding to the chief of staff’s vexation but deepening the envelopment when he did at last advance on the morning of the 27th. On Samsonov’s right flank the two German corps entered the battle at the same time as he was sitting down to dinner.
As we at the head of the column came out of the dreadful wood, a shower of infantry fire suddenly hailed down on us. Lieutenant-Colonel Schulz stopped a bullet in the temple and fell like a board, but he soon came to, swore frightfully and asked for a cigarette. Meanwhile we had brought up artillery from the wood, and the Russian rabble, leaving behind a number of rifles and packs, beat a hasty retreat, back into the darkness from which it had emerged. It was now fortunately midnight, pitch dark ... The greater part of the marching column was still stretched along the narrow road through the wood. In a word, there was no alternative than to fall out where we were . . . So we dozed in half-sleep till first light. Finally it cleared and it became apparent that the enemy was in full flight towards Ortelsburg.10
Although the Russians acknowledged that the situation was changing rapidly on the 27th, Samsonov continued to underestimate the strength of the Germans facing him and to order movements calculated to worsen the predicament of the 2nd Army rather than extricate it. On 29 August, with his army losing cohesion in the woods and with his command collapsing through lack of intelligence and inadequate communications, Samsonov confronted the reality. He went off into the forest and shot himself. By 31 August the Germans had taken 92,000 prisoners and nearly 400 guns; 50,000 Russians were dead or wounded.
The Russian feeling of inferiority when confronted by German troops, as opposed to Austro-Hungarian, persisted for the rest of the war. The Germans vengefully named their victory after the village of Tannenberg, where the Teutonic Knights had been defeated by the Poles in 1410. The symbolism of the battle was more important than its strategic effect. Victory where the Germans had not expected it (in the east) was used to cover over its absence where it was actually most needed (in the west). Hindenburg and Ludendorff were elevated as national heroes. The long-term political effects in a constitution as ill-developed as that of Germany were enormous: these men became to the domestic politics of Wilhelmine Germany what Napoleon Bonaparte was to Revolutionary France. And their success convinced them that the war would be won on the eastern front. It was twice the length of that in the west, and its force-to-space ratio made for lower troop densities, so creating more opportunities for manoeuvre. Hindenburg and Ludendorff saw Tannenberg as confirmation that Schlieffen’s teaching was right. The answer to the tactical imponderables of the modern battlefield was envelopment. What had been achieved at Tannenberg through pragmatism and an awareness of contingencies became enshrined as dogma.
The reality was that the mass army, with all its supply needs and its artillery, relied on an effective network of roads and railways to sustain its advance. ‘The Germans’, a Russian guards officer recalled, ‘had a line for every army corps and sometimes even for a division . . . Roughly, the Russian army had one line to supply an army of three or four army corps . . . The result was that the jamming of traffic affected the supply of the army, paralysed the evacuation of the wounded and interfered with the bringing up of the reserves.’ 11 But once the German army operated beyond its own frontier, it was subject to the same constraints as the Russian. That was precisely the reason why Schlieffen had forsaken his predecessors’ predilection for a war in the east and devoted greater attention to Germany’s western front.
Tannenberg was a defensive victory. Following up speedily at the battle of the Masurian lakes, the 8th Army drove Rennenkampf back behind the Russian frontier. East Prussia was secure. But the Germans had not given the Austrians the aid they wanted: they had repulsed a Russian invasion but they had not drawn the bulk of the Russian forces away from the Austro-Hungarian front - nor, despite the scale of Samsonov’s defeat, had they squashed Grand Duke Nikolay’s plan to use Poland as the launching pad for an invasion of Silesia. At the beginning of September Conrad called for the implementation of the Siedlitz manoeuvre, the envelopment of Russian Poland from north and south. This held a double appeal for Hindenburg and Ludendorff: it would conform to their Schlieffenesque concept of operations and it would ward off the fresh threat to German territory. But the allies were now out of step. Conrad had summoned up a scheme to which his own army could not possibly contribute. It was retreating in disorder. By mid-September what he needed was direct assistance, not some ambitious plan hatched on the map and designed to wrap up the eastern front at a stroke.
Then the pressure on the Austro-Hungarian armies eased. Nobody stopped to ask what the Russians were doing. The two allies were able to effect a joint advance towards the Vistula. On 9 October Przemysl was relieved. But the success was deceptive. Grand Duke Nikolay was massing three armies behind the Vistula, ready for his own advance into Poland. He planned not only to provide direct aid to France, but also to consolidate and broaden the Russian victory in Galicia. He, too, hoped to achieve a massive envelopment, and the Germans were walking into the trap. ‘On 11 October’, wrote August von Mackensen, whose corps was closing in on Warsaw, ‘the earlier appreciation of the overall operational situation changed utterly. A Russian order captured on the battlefield at Grojec ... revealed the views of the supreme Russian command and the deployment of their forces on the entire Vistula front.’12 The Germans fell back, blaming the Austrians rather than their own intelligence failures, and Przemysl was besieged once more. However, they had escaped the Russian envelopment, and transport difficulties again hampered the Russian pursuit.
EASTERN FRONT V. WESTERN FRONT
On 30 October Ludendorff travelled to Berlin to meet Erich von Falkenhayn. Nominally Falkenhayn was still minister of war, but since Moltke’s disgrace on the Marne he had also been de facto chief of the general staff. Falkenhayn enjoyed the favour of the Kaiser, a factor of crucial importance in the months ahead. He was good-looking, young by the standards of German generals (he was fifty-three), and his career had followed a very different trajectory from those of the general staff officers over whom he now presided. While they were being schooled by Schlieffen, he was serving in China. His overseas service had left him with a strong impression of Britain’s maritime and imperial power. Here for him was the hub of the Entente, and therefore the centre of gravity for German strategy. However, the fact that he was not fully part of that enclosed world of operational planning, of staff rides and map exercises, also meant that he had something to prove. His initial response in the aftermath of the Marne had been to seek envelopment through manoeuvre with all the zeal of a true pupil of Schlieffen. Each effort to do so had been thwarted by the French and British armies as they, too, cobbled together forces to extend their left flank northwards and so block German efforts to get into their rear. When Ludendorff and Falkenhayn met, the final stage of this process was being fought out in a vicious and protracted battle at Ypres, the ancient Flemish city whose fortifications guarded the Channel ports.
Falkenhayn, fourth from right, directs the German 9th Army in its invasion of Romania, autumn 1916 The scale and speed of his victory gave the lie to those who questioned his grasp of operations
Six new corps were forming in Germany and Ludendorff appeared to accept Falkenhayn’s wish to put them into the Ypres sector. But Falkenhayn, too, seemed to collude in Ludendorff’s aspiration to fight envelopment battles in the east. The Schlieffen legacy created mutual misapprehension: at the strategic level it led Ludendorff to acknowledge the priority of the western front over the eastern; at the operational level it led Falkenhayn to realise that great victories were more likely in the east. The eastern front was twice the length of the western, and its armies were more thinly spread over terrain which was less urbanised. The opportunities for manoeuvre were therefore greater. Following the meeting, on 1 November Hindenburg was appointed commander-in-chief of all German troops on the eastern front, with Ludendorff as his chief of staff. The task of OberOst, as the new command was called, was twofold. It was to mount a local counterattack in Poland while Falkenhayn got on with fighting at Ypres, and it was to provide a counterweight to the Austrian high command. Conrad von Hötzendorff blamed the failure in Poland on Hindenburg and Ludendorff, and had made an absurd request for thirty German divisions for the eastern front. The gap between imagination and reality in Conrad’s thought now meant that Falkenhayn was not alone in wanting to find a mechanism to curb him. Even Franz Josef wanted him to go.
The formation of OberOst empowered rather than appeased Falkenhayn’s critics within Germany. Within two days, on 3 November, the mutual misapprehension between Falkenhayn and Ludendorff had flared into an open hostility which was to deepen over the next eighteen months and divide strategic counsels in Germany. Ludendorff elevated OberOst’s limited mission into a massive envelopment battle. It culminated in desperate winter fighting round ód in Poland. He wanted more troops. But on 4 November Falkenhayn, now publicly appointed chief of the general staff, renewed the attack at Ypres. It failed, with a total German casualty bill of 80,000. Falkenhayn’s response was not to redirect his strategic goals to where the Germans were able to achieve operational solutions. Instead he suggested that Germany abandon any hope of overall success. It was absurd for two conservative monarchies to be fighting each other in a war which could only benefit their real long-term rival, Britain. Germany should therefore seek a separate peace with Russia, so as to be able to concentrate its efforts in the west.
In the context of November 1914 such pragmatism was tantamount to betrayal. Arthur Zimmermann, the under-secretary at the Foreign Ministry, was aghast. He saw the Balkans and Turkey as the strategic crux of the central powers’ war effort. This was their route to the wider world; their device to prevent the formation of a hostile Balkan league; and their means to outflank both Britain and Russia. In 1915 he was to be one of those in Berlin whose anxieties were focused on Gallipoli. The Austrians could hardly gainsay such arguments: this was what the July crisis had been all about. But Conrad was now of the view that the solution to the Dual Monarchy’s Balkan problems lay on the eastern front proper, with the defeat of Russia: kill the viper, and the contents of the nest would also die. OberOst therefore had powerful allies. Not even the chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, was on Falkenhayn’s side. Although he recognised the force of Falkenhayn’s logic, he believed that the Russians were more likely to be brought to the negotiating table if they had first been soundly beaten. Moreover, he - like many senior army officers - was appalled by Falkenhayn’s pessimism. Thus Germany’s best chance for the formulation of a sensible strategy - the formation of a pact between Falkenhayn and Bethmann Hollweg - was forfeit. Bethmann Hollweg, whom many British observers at the time counted a closet liberal, delivered himself into the hands of Hindenburg and Ludendorff.
The debate between ‘westerners’ and ’easterners’ in Germany was far more real than the one between soldiers and politicians in Britain that went under the same title. The latter was largely fought out after the war in the pages of their memoirs; this one resulted in the failure of any hopes for domestic political reform and ultimately committed the country to the pursuit of a total victory which it could not achieve. If Germany had possessed more robust allies than either the Ottoman Empire or, more particularly, Austria-Hungary proved to be, the arguments would never have gained such momentum. But their weakness meant that Germany had constantly to bail them out and could never concentrate on the western front to the exclusion of others.
On 25 November 1914 Falkenhayn recognised failure at Ypres and ordered the German armies in the west to abandon manoeuvre warfare and adopt deep, defensive positions for the foreseeable future. But his intention was not to elevate trench warfare into an end in itself; instead, it was a means to an end - the creation of disposable forces for use elsewhere. A systematic defence in the west would enable fewer men to hold the ground. In February 1915 the German army in the west was restructured: every division was reduced from four to three infantry regiments. This combination of tactical and organisational expedients created a strategic reserve for mobile and offensive operations elsewhere.
Falkenhayn had not yet accepted that these attacks would be in the east and when he did - in March 1915 - he did not adopt OberOst’s agenda. Hindenburg and Ludendorff dreamt of massive envelopments in northern Russia and the seizure of the Baltic states. Falkenhayn’s priority was different: to buttress Austria-Hungary and in particular to finish with Serbia. Success here might sway the neutral powers in the Balkans and could even persuade the Central Powers’ nominal ally, Italy, to honour its obligations. But Conrad could not turn to the Balkans while he was under such pressure from the Russians in the Carpathians. Falkenhayn’s political judgement was evident not only in his sensitivity to the possible diplomatic consequences of military success but also in his handling of the command issue. The idea for the offensive that followed was Austrian, but its execution was German. The sector chosen, in Galicia, between Gorlice and Tarnow, close to railway communications and free of river lines immediately to its front, lay in Conrad’s area of responsibility. He said four German divisions would suffice for the attack, but Falkenhayn offered four corps, and so was able to create a joint Austro-German army group for the first time in the war. He then appointed a German, August von Mackensen, to its command, thus side-stepping not only Conrad but also Hindenburg and Ludendorff. Neither side forgave him. ‘I can only love or hate’, Ludendorff told Groener, ‘and I hate General von Falkenhayn.’13
THE GREAT RETREAT
OberOst was left out in the cold in more ways than one. Mackensen’s chief of staff was Hans von Seeckt. ‘It is endlessly less important where Mackensen and the Bug-Armee break through,’ Falkenhayn said of later operations, ‘than that they should merely break through somewhere.’14 In the conditions created by trench war breakthrough, not envelopment, was the crucial method. Seeckt had refined the technique at Soissons, on the western front, in December 1914. The key was the use of artillery - a short and sudden bombardment aimed to stun rather than destroy, and so less demanding of shell supply. At Gorlice-Tarnow the Central Powers collected 334 heavy guns to 4 Russian, 1,272 field guns to 675, and 96 trench mortars to none. It was the densest artillery concentration of the war so far: one heavy gun every 132 yards and one field gun every 45 yards. The Germans and Austrians could overlook the Russian positions to direct their fire. Their success was aided by the weakness of the Russian trenches compared with those in the west: they were devoid of overhead cover and the whole position - three lines of trenches forming a single defensive zone - lacked depth.
The artillery began its preliminary registration on 1 May. In the early hours of 2 May German patrols went forward to probe for soft spots and destroy the wire, and then at 6 a.m. an intense bombardment opened. At 7 a.m. Hauptmann von Loebell’s Guards regiment pushed two of its battalions forward into an abandoned Russian position. At 10 a.m. the artillery lifted, seeking more distant targets and aiming to isolate the battlefield from Russian reinforcements. ‘The defenders,’ Loebell reported, ‘who had suffered little under artillery fire, were ready for the storm, but they did not believe that the storming columns had already broken out from the position, since they had not observed our preparations. When we suddenly came up the slope, they were completely surprised and fired too high, and as a result our losses were amazingly light. My company only lost, in spite of heavy machine-gun fire, three men dead and four wounded . . . We captured six kilometres of ground.’15 Within two days the Austro-German forces had broken through and within a week the Russians had lost 210,000 men, as many as 140,000 of whom were prisoners of war. Their entire position in the Carpathians was unhinged, and they had to fall back on a 160-km front. Przemysl was retaken on 3 June and Lemberg on 22 June. Mackensen and Seeckt, not Hindenburg and Ludendorff, were the most successful double-act in the German army in the First World War.
Falkenhayn’s aims were limited and he had anticipated quickly turning against Serbia. But his stunning success reopened the hopes of a separate peace with Russia. In the north Hindenburg overran the Baltic states, providing cover for Gorlice-Tarnow but also reactivating his hopes for a massive envelopment. Falkenhayn accepted the case for a less ambitious operation with Poland as its focus. The offensive opened on 13 July and German troops entered Warsaw on 5 August. They crossed the Bug in the middle of the month, and captured the fortified cities of Grodno and Brest-Litovsk by its end. Vilna fell on 19 September. Russian losses since May totalled 1.4 million men.
More than half of them were prisoners of war. And that was true for the war as a whole, not just for the summer of 1915. In a major action on the western front casualties normally divided one-third dead, one-third wounded and one-third captured, and, averaged over the war as a whole, the proportion of prisoners of war in relation to total losses was much smaller. The greater fluidity of the eastern front gave greater opportunities for capture. But Russia’s casualty profile is also revealing of the morale of the Russian army. Before the war the incidence of strikes - which had both soared in number and become increasingly politicised - peaked in July 1914, and conservatives had warned against war for its ability to stoke revolution. The actual experience of mobilisation suggested that such fears had been misplaced: ‘As if by magic the revolutionary disorders had died down at the announcement of war’. In Petrograd (as St Petersburg had been renamed), ‘patriotic military fervour had gripped the workmen . . . They cheered us enthusiastically as we marched by their factories.’16 Ninety-six per cent of reservists reported for duty, a rate not far behind that of France. But, as in France, public demonstrations of enthusiasm were urban phenomena, and of all the major armies of 1914 Russia’s was overwhelmingly made up of peasants. Their loyalties were regional rather than national. They had crops to harvest and families to feed. Mobilisation prompted rioting in 49 out of 101 provinces [oblast] in European and Asiatic Russia. Russia’s great resource in the eyes of its Western allies was its manpower. In 1914 Russia mobilised 6.5 million men, and it could still raise a further 5 million in 1915. But the loyalties of those men were brittle. ‘What would be the feelings of these people for their Little Father [the Tsar],’ Sir George Buchanan, the British ambassador, wondered, ‘were the war to be unduly prolonged?’17 As the army expanded, its cadres shrank. It had lost 60,000 officers by late summer 1915, and by September ‘the number of officers of every kind in the normal division of sixteen battalions and six batteries had fallen to an average of 110’.18 The surprise, as Britain’s military attaché observed, was not that the retreat had been so great but that the army was intact at all.
The Germans first entered Szawle, in the centre of Lithuania, on 30 April 1915, but they had to withdraw again on 11 May, and did not finally take it until 21 July. Realising that the Baltic states were not Russian, they determined to make them culturally German
This did not stop both Britain and France complaining that Russia had failed to maximise its potential. It raised 15 million men in the war, a massive number in absolute terms, but only 39 per cent of its population of military age. France, with a population one-quarter the size of Russia‘s, drafted 79 per cent of its male population of military age to create an army half as strong. Britain, which did not introduce conscription until 1916, and which argued that its contribution to the war was industrial and economic, still enlisted 49 per cent of its men aged fifteen to forty-nine for military service. Russia’s response to its allies’ criticisms focused less on its lack of officers and non-commissioned officers for such a massive army and more on its shortage of munitions.
All the belligerents faced a problem converting their industrial bases from peacetime to wartime production. In earlier wars armies had run out of shells because of difficulties with transport and supply. But in the winter of 1914-15 position warfare both eased that constraint on shell consumption and generated more targets for guns to engage. Given time to adapt plant and rejig machine-tools, industrialised societies could adapt to these demands. By late 1915 they mostly had. States struck compromises with capitalist enterprises which both presaged an intervention in the workings of the market and involved an acceptance of its freedom. But Russia had a further hurdle to surmount: it was an industrialising power rather than an industrialised one. Its comparative lack of railways, all too evident to its soldiers as they retreated across Poland and into Belorussia, was a case in point. It demanded help from its Western allies, whose production, particularly that of Britain, it seemed to regard as inexhaustible. But Britain, too, was having to convert its industry to war production and was simultaneously creating a mass army from scratch. Like Russia, it found that getting men was easier than giving them rifles with which to fight. It also wondered how far the aid it gave its ally was actually meeting the immediate demands of war rather than underpinning Russia’s long-term infrastructural needs. It was doing both.
German hussars cross the River Drina in August 1915. In eastern Europe sloping river banks permitted cavalry to ford rivers easily, in the west the canalisation of rivers made it more difficult The lance was widely adopted by cavalry regiments in Europe before the war
The Russian army destroyed what it could not take with it when retreating in May 1915 In this photograph the Austro-Hungarian oil installations at Boryslaw in Galicia are still smouldering.
The great retreat compounded Russia’s munitions difficulties in two ways. First, the army abandoned massive quantities of equipment. At Kovno, the Germans captured 1,300 guns, 53,000 rounds of heavy-artillery shell and 800,000 rounds of field-artillery shell. With the army falling back, the rifles of the dead and wounded could not be collected from the battlefield. ‘The further we went’, one Russian army commander recalled, ‘the greater became the number of weaponless men, and now we no longer knew how to set about training them.’19 As winter drew in, Prince A. Lobanov-Rostovsky ‘saw infantry companies being formed of four platoons, of which two were armed and two were not. In case of battle the two unarmed platoons were to pick up rifles and ammunition from those who had fallen in front of them.’20 Shortages of equipment in turn affected morale. Second, areas of production were themselves lost. Efforts were made to evacuate businesses, but they were frenzied and haphazard. In Riga firms had fourteen days to dismantle machinery. Once it was loaded on wagons and sent off to the interior, it stayed there, on sidings or even going in circles round the country, rusting in the Russian winter.
All the areas subject to invasion or confronting its threat came under military administration. The principal thought in the mind of the chief of the general staff, Nikolay Yanushkevich, was to scorch the earth, to leave the invaders nothing but wilderness. The effects were not only dire for industry; they were also dire for the civilian population. ‘We were forced to burn our homes and crops, we weren’t allowed to take our cattle with us, we weren’t even allowed to return to our homes to get some money.’21 By the end of 1915 there were about 3.3 million refugees in Russia. Propertied families had been impoverished; industrialised cities had been stripped of their workforce. In Warsaw the entire population was told to leave, on the grounds that the Poles were supportive of Austria-Hungary. In Vilna the same instruction was issued to all men of military age, and then the city was burnt. The refugees carried and spread disease, particularly cholera and typhus, and as they fled they resorted to looting and pillaging to survive, further jeopardising the authority of the state. The fact that as a result the army compounded the difficulties of its own retreat, clogging an already inadequate transport system, suggests that in some cases its response was more ideological than strategic. It took the opportunity to ‘cleanse’ certain areas of what it saw as unreliable elements, particularly German settlers, although many of them had relatives serving in the Russian army, and Jews. ’The complete hostility of the entire Jewish population toward the Russian army is well established‘, one army commander told Yanushkevich.22
That would not have been surprising. Several thousand Jews had been killed in pogroms in 1881 and 1905, and many more had been forced by state-supported persecution to emigrate. However, Yanushkevich’s anti-Semitism was so extreme as to outrage even Russian opinion, particularly those circles anxious to woo the country’s liberal allies, France and Britain. Moreover, the great exodus liberated the Jews from the Pale of the Settlement, the area to the west and south-west to which they had been restricted. The Pale was formally abolished in August 1915, and Jews were free not only to move further east but also to settle in the countryside as well as in the towns. For the Jews of Russia, the war opened doors rather than closed them. In Germany Jews were much more fully assimilated: most saw the war not as an opportunity for Zionism but as a means by which to consolidate their integration in the Reich. Although their alliance with Turkey prevented the Germans from publicly supporting the idea of a Jewish homeland, they did act as the protectors of Jews within the Ottoman Empire. The suspicions of the Russian army, therefore, were not totally without foundation: for Germany’s army in the east, the Jews were indeed potential collaborators. The attractions to Germany of an alliance with Islam to undermine the British found its corollary in an alliance with the Jews of Poland and the Baltic states in order to defeat the Russians. A German committee for the liberation of Russian Jews was set up on 17 August 1914, and as the German armies advanced in the summer of 1915 they used Jews as interpreters and as middle-men in the procurement of supplies and transport.
Many German Jews were, however, repelled by the Jews of the east, who not only dressed and behaved very differently from themselves but also were more fervent in their beliefs. ‘No, I did not belong to these people, even if one proved my blood relation to them a hundred times over,’ wrote Victor Klem-perer, who worked in OberOst’s press section. ‘I belonged to Europe, to Germany, and I thanked my creator that I was German.’23 Klemperer’s reactions were little different from those of most other Germans as they penetrated deeper into Russian territory. First, they realised that the western Russian empire was no monolith, but a hotch-potch of competing and overlapping nationalities and ethnic groupings - including Lithuanians, Latvians, Poles, and Ukrainians. Some of these might be potential allies. Second, the massive territories that they overran seemed backward and even primitive, under-cultivated and sparsely populated. As it assumed administrative and economic responsibility for the Baltic states it occupied, OberOst persuaded itself that ‘this area could become a bread basket of wheat and cattle, wood and wool, of the very highest value’.24 Ludendorff set out on a long-term project to civilise and cultivate Kurland, Latvia and Lithuania on the German model and through the in strumentality of the German army. The eastern front became more than an area for operational manoeuvre; now it was also a sphere for settlement and colonisation, a focus for political ambition as well as military.
Although the German army was not free from anti-Semitism, Jews were sufficiently integrated to be able to observe their own traditions, including Hanukkah, the ‘Festival of the Lights’, in Poland in December 1916
The consequences for the population were disastrous. Enlisted in forced labour battalions, they were unable to till their land, and famine struck in the winter of 1916-17. Their resources were plundered to feed both their occupiers and the needs of Germany: Lithuania’s wartime exports were valued at 338 million marks, but its imports at 77 million. To the south, Poland was placed under civilian control. However, that did not stop the army, including in due course Ludendorff, spelling out what they felt should happen to it. They wanted to tap its manpower by creating a Polish legion. A Polish army implied the promise of political independence, a solution which would carry the additional benefit after the war of creating a buffer state between Germany and Russia. But Poland had the potential to create a rift between Germany and Austria-Hungary. The latter regarded Poland, or at least its southern part, as an extension of its own lands in Galicia. Worries about exacerbating the nationality problem within the empire, fostered particularly by the Magyars, held it back from the idea of a full take-over, but equally powerful concerns about its overbearing ally prevented it from endorsing a German solution to the Polish question. On 13 August 1915 Bethmann Hollweg agreed to support an Austro-Polish solution, a self-governing state under the Habsburg crown. However, Germany’s enthusiasm for the scheme became conditional on the understanding that the Dual Monarchy would itself be subordinated to Berlin. The mechanism for this control would be a central European customs union dominated by Germany, a scheme popularised by the liberal Friedrich Naumann in his book Mitteleuropa, published in 1915. These ideas, and their attendant appetites, became firmer as the chances of a compromise settlement with Russia receded: Russia would not negotiate on the basis of Poland’s independence and the Baltic states’ incorporation in a greater Germany.
Russia, given its abundance of manpower, had less cause than most to put under-age soldiers in the front line in 1915. This boy was one of about 3 million Russians captured in the war, of whom 70,000 died in captivity.
The hope that Russia might seek terms had proved illusory. All three Entente powers had pledged themselves not to make a separate peace under the pact of London on 5 September 1914, and in March 1915 the Western allies had promised Russia the long-sought prize of Constantinople and control of the straits if the Entente won the war. By the end of September the German advance had reached its logistic limits. The sandy roads turned to mud as the autumn rains began. Russian railways, built on a broader gauge, had to be converted to German specifications. A total of 434 bridges were constructed in the Bialystok-Grodno area alone. The line stabilised as Falkenhayn expected. Yanushkevich was dismissed and his superior, Grand Duke Nikolay, shunted off to the Caucasus. Against the advice of his ministers, the Tsar took over the supreme command himself, as he had wanted to do from the outset. The survival of the regime now depended on its waging of the war. The difficulty for an autocrat was that many - including industrialists and Western allies - believed that Russia could best tap its potential by liberalisation. Russia certainly rallied in an extraordinary fashion in the winter of 1915-16. Shell production for field guns rose month on month despite the loss of territory and plant, doubling between May and July 1915 to reach 852,000 rounds in the latter month, and 1.5 million in November. Total output in 1915 was 11.2 million rounds, in 1916 28.3 million.25 The strength of the field army, which had fallen to 3.9 million men in mid-September 1915, recovered to 6.2 million men by February 1916 and 6.8 million on 1 June. Three days later General Aleksey Brusilov launched an offensive in Galicia which showed that the Russian army, too, could master the techniques of the breakthrough battle, and which confirmed its continuing ability to defeat the Austro-Hungarians when they were not supported by their allies.
ITALY JOINS THE ENTENTE
The renewed stabilisation of the eastern front in the autumn of 1915 changed the complexion of Germany’s debate on its war aims. Bethmann Hollweg had drawn up a programme of objectives on 9 September 1914. Its content - control of Belgium and north-eastern France, and the suggestion of comparable acquisitions in the east and in central Africa - was relatively constant over the rest of the war, but the context was not. In September 1914, the chancellor was confronted with two possibilities: a quick victory, in which case he would need to know the basis on which he was negotiating the peace, or a long war, in which case the coal and iron ore of north-western Europe would be fundamental to the maintenance of the German war effort. In any event, one idea scouted in the September programme - that German trade might be confined to a central European customs bloc, under German domination - made little sense in the long term. For the world’s second largest manufacturer it was a considerable reduction on the pre-war opportunities for trade offered by the open market. However, it reflected two immediate requirements. The first was the expectation that after the war the Entente powers would do their best to close Germany off from world markets. The second was the need to accommodate the ambitions of their allies within an envelope shaped by Germany. As the war lengthened both these pressures increased, while the possibility of a negotiated settlement receded. Therefore war aims hardened and expanded. Given Germany’s weak party structure and its under-developed parliamentary system, they became the vehicle for interest-group politics and divisive public debate. They were also less important for what they said about Germany’s designs on the enemy than for their evidence of Germany’s determination to woo or to appease its allies.
None of the original belligerents in 1914, including Germany, went to war in pursuance of so-called war aims. Most of the war’s later entrants did. They exercised choice, and they sold their services to the highest bidder. Between 1914 and 1916 both sets of allies focused their recruiting efforts in the Balkans, broadly defined, wooing Italy, Bulgaria, Greece and Romania. Of these, the most blatant in its exploitation of the opportunities which the war presented was Italy. In October 1914, its prime minister, Antonio Salandra, characterised its policy as ‘sacro egoismo’. His aim was simple, to gain ‘frontiers on land and sea no longer open to annexation, and [to raise] Italy, in reality, to the status of a great power’.26
The key question for Rome was which side was best placed to deliver what Italy wanted. When General Luigi Cadorna was appointed chief of the Italian general staff in July 1914, following the death of his predecessor, Alberto Pollio, he set about readying the army for war against France. This was entirely in accordance with Italy’s membership of the Triple Alliance, but contrary both to the dictates of its geopolitical position and to the inclinations of its government. Geographically, Italy was a sea power, dependent on maritime trade and vulnerable to British naval pressure. Ideologically, the left favoured the Entente. The Italians had had to expel Austria from their peninsula in order to achieve unification in 1860: the relations of the two powers were more naturally characterised by enmity than by cooperation, and the navies they both built before 1914 were designed for use in the Adriatic, and therefore against each other. Salandra had little difficulty in interpreting the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum to Serbia as an aggressive act, deeming Italy to be free of its alliance obligations and declaring it a neutral power on 31 July. The German defeat on the Marne confirmed for most Italians the wisdom of his move. But they did not necessarily conclude that this would be the last word. Cadorna began to ready his army for war against Austria-Hungary. Italy was now open to the highest bidder.
Germany was prepared to raise the ante, but at its ally’s expense. About half the population of the Austrian provinces along the frontier with Italy, from Trieste to Tyrol, were Italian. Although they were both privileged and wealthy by comparison with the Slav population in the region, the latter was growing in numbers. The Austro-Italians turned to Rome. After effectively abrogating the Triple Alliance, Italy was free to respond to their call. Germany wanted Austria-Hungary to solve the problem by giving the Trentino to Italy. The Austrians responded that once they made that sort of concession to one national grouping they would be under pressure to do so to all the others, and the empire would collapse. They argued that they could hand over territory in the south-west of their empire only if the loss was offset by gains in the north-east: they demanded more of Poland in recompense. The internal wrangling between the Central Powers ensured that they lagged behind the Entente in the bidding for Italy. When the Austro-Hungarian common council eventually agreed to cede the Trentino on 8 March 1915, the fall of Przemysl two weeks later promptly led Rome to increase its wants. The Entente offered the Dalmatian coastline as well, a gambit Vienna could not match. Most Italian opinion was neutral, but not vehemently so. The neutralists latched on to the former liberal prime minister Giovanni Giolitti as their spokesman. Liberalism in a country that lacked the economic maturity to sustain its aspirations to great power status had shallow foundations. Giolitti was as ready as Salandra to use the war to promote Italy’s expansion at Austria-Hungary’s expense, but he reckoned that it could be done without Italy itself having to fight. Salandra was sufficiently aware of Giolitti’s challenge to his hold on office to ensure that the jockeying for domestic power increased the stakes. Joining the war on the side of the Entente fused nationalism and liberalism, and even appealed to some revolutionaries. Benito Mussolini split with the Socialist Party to call for war: ‘Revolution’, he said, citing Napoleon, ‘is an idea that has found bayonets.’27
On other fronts, heavy artillery could be brought into position by rail, but in the Alps - as in Africa - much motive power was human. Austro-Hungarian troops manhandle a 24cm howitzer up a peak of 7,295 feet.
Italy adhered to the pact of London on 26 April 1915 and declared war on Austria-Hungary (but not on Germany) on 23 May. The Italian army was not fully prepared for war in Europe, and indeed was still heavily committed in Libya. It was short of 13,500 officers. Although it mobilised 1.2 million men, it had equipment for only 732,000. The problems of its war economy were comparable with those of Russia: it was not a fully industrialised power. In 1912-13, the army had been allocated 47 per cent of state spending, and since 1862 it had received an average of 17.4 per cent. However, Italy’s backwardness meant that the actual sums were small. Its re-equipment with quick-firing field artillery had just been completed, but it was short of heavier pieces and of mountain guns. The latter were particularly relevant, given the battlefield it now faced.
Of all the fronts of the First World War the Italian was the most ill suited for offensive operations, or indeed for any form of war at all. The frontier with Austria-Hungary was 600 km long, and four-fifths of it was made up of mountains. Several peaks rose above 3,000m; in the winter they were covered with ice and snow, and explosions could set off avalanches. In the summer the rock made entrenching impossible and sent off jagged splinters when hit by shellfire. Its northern sector was dominated by the Austro-Hungarian salient of Tyrol and the Trentino. Here Italy’s task was to hold the passes to prevent the Austrians from debouching onto the Venetian plain. As the frontier moved east it formed a fresh, Italian salient, bounded to the north by the Dolomites and the Carinthian Alps. It then swung due south following the line of the River Isonzo as it made its way to the Adriatic. Even here the Italians were going uphill, in the face of good fields of fire, but this was the logical sector on which to attack. It was the shortest route to Trieste and Ljubljana. Cadorna deployed fourteen of his thirty-five divisions along its 100 km.
Italy’s entry to the war caused less panic in Austria-Hungary than it ought to have done. The addition of a third front to an empire which a year before had embarked on a short war on one could only stretch its resources to breaking point. But in the pre-war years Conrad von Hötzendorff had suggested a pre-emptive strike against Italy almost as often as against Serbia. Its treachery in not honouring its alliance obligations confirmed that - in Conrad’s words - it was ‘a snake whose head has not been crushed in time’.28 The prospect of war with Italy revitalised the Dual Monarchy. Slovenes, Croats and Serbs could rally against a common enemy, and the success at Gorlice-Tarnow was well timed in relieving the most obvious pressure on the empire. Under pressure from Falkenhayn to give priority to the east and not to divert forces to the Italian front, the Austrians fought defensively - and did so successfully and with determination. ‘Will you tell me’, Enzo Valentino, an eighteen-year-old volunteer from Perugia, asked his mother from the front on 3 September, ‘why you persist in imagining and believing a lot of things which I do not write to you? ... To be always going forward, and soon to be about to make a great advance? I have never heard anything of all this. As to advancing, it is now a month and a half that I have been up here and always in the same place.’ In the same letter he reported the first fall of the snow. Seven weeks later he was killed by shrapnel fire, an edelweiss in his cap, as he ran forward, shouting ‘Savoia, Savoia, Italia’.29 Or at least that was what Captain Carlo Mayo told his mother. In four battles on the Isonzo in 1915 alone the Italians made no appreciable progress, suffering 235,000 casualties, of whom 54,000 were dead.
Italy’s mountain troops, the Alpini, reflected the growing pre-war enthusiasm in Europe for winter sports They proved very effective in the Tyrol, but the opportunities for ski attacks and even for downhill skiing proved limited
SERBIA DEFEATED
Italy was no nearer achieving its objectives, but in the lapse of time between Enzo Valentino’s mother receiving her son’s report of the first snow and the news of his death, Bulgaria had gained all that it wanted from the war. Its heart’s desire was Serbian Macedonia. The Entente could not offer that, but the Central Powers could - and did. What held the Bulgarians back was the threats on their other frontiers - the possibility of Romania and Greece joining the Entente, and the dangers of a British and French victory at Gallipoli. By the autumn the success of the Turks and the defeat of the Russians not only removed these dangers but also made it unlikely that Romania or Greece would be persuaded to opt for the Entente. The lamentable Austro-Hungarian record against Serbia was still a consideration. So the Bulgarians made it a condition of their belligerence that the Central Powers attack Serbia from the north first, and that they do so under German, not Austrian, command; they would follow from the east within five days. A military convention to this effect was signed on 6 September.
Falkenhayn thus returned to his original strategy for the east. Neither Austria-Hungary nor Turkey wished to make Serbia a priority, arguing that victory against Russia would settle the Balkans. Falkenhayn reversed their logic: if Serbia was overrun, Russia’s foothold in the Balkans would be removed. That would be reason enough for Russia to seek peace, but there would be another. The overland route from Berlin to Constantinople would be opened. Germany could then re-equip the Ottoman armies, enabling them not only to finish off the Gallipoli campaign but also to serve Arthur Zimmermann’s schemes for taking the war to the British Empire. Russia’s hopes that it might be resupplied through the warm-water ports of the Black Sea would be finished.
Falkenhayn’s arguments were also operational. The approach of winter made continued progress in Russia impossible; further south there might just be time for a quick campaign. The rain was already heavy, and the Danube was in spate and in places a thousand yards wide. The Austro-Hungarian attacks of 1914 had been directed across the rivers Sava and Drina, from Bosnia and the west, with diversions from the north. Mackensen, who was given ten German divisions and the overall command, reversed the process, so shortening his lines of communications. Minor attacks along the Drina and a feint to the east at Orsova covered the main thrust from the north. Mackensen’s men, supported by heavy artillery and Austro-Hungarian monitors on the river itself, and using the river’s islands as staging posts, crossed the Danube between 7 and 9 October. On the 9th Belgrade fell to the Austrians once more, and to the east the German 11th Army began its advance up the valley of the River Morava. The Serbs planned to counterattack, but on i4 October were taken in their eastern flank by Bulgaria. The railway line from Niş to the south and Salonika was cut two days later.
To escape envelopment the Serb army had to retreat either south towards Greece or south-west to Albania. The Bulgarians were in the process of closing off the first route and mountains barred the second. Thomas Troubridge, who had been in command of the British navy’s vessels on the Danube, met Radomir Putnik, the Serb commander-in-chief, on 30 October: ‘I did not see any disposition to finally despair or any indication of immediately throwing up the sponge’. But the organisational skills of Putnik’s staff did not match its chief’s resolve. The roads were clogged not just with troops but also with their families and household goods. ‘At the Headquarters Mess’, a week later, ‘at de jeuner there were 30 women & 20 children at least & wherever they move they have all the motors & take with them their servants & furniture & batteries de cuisine & everything.’30 The worsening weather added to the problems of the retreat, but at least delayed Mackensen’s forces, so giving the Serbs time to escape the jaws of the envelopment. By 25 November the Serb army was hemmed in on the plain of Kosovo. The path to the south was blocked by the Bulgarians, who were across the River Vardar. Putnik decided that Serbia’s future lay not in a climactic battle on this emotive site but in the survival of its army. He ordered a retreat across the mountains to the Albanian coast. ‘We slowly creep towards the sheer cliffs of Mount akor, step by step on the compacted snow’, Josip Jeras wrote in his diary. ‘On either side of the road refugees are resting. Immobilized by the snow their heads are glued to their breasts. The white snowflakes dance around them while the alpine winds whistle their songs of death. The heads of horses and oxen which have fallen off the path protrude from the snow.‘31 Following narrow tracks, rising to 3,000 feet, and with the temperature dropping to -20°, the Serbs struggled through snowdrifts and across ice to reach the Adriatic. A hundred and forty thousand got there and were taken off by Entente vessels to Corfu, and thence to Salonika. Of an original strength of 420,000 men in September, some 94,000 had been killed or wounded in action and a further 174,000 were captured or missing. Civilian deaths have not been calculated. The Serbs suffered the greatest losses in relation to population size of any participant in the war.
Images of defeat: exhausted Serb soldiers in Belgrade in October 1915
Serb field artillery battles through the snow to the Albanian frontier, November 1915. The French had sold Serbia 75mm quick-firing guns before the war.
The Central Powers had now united the two halves of their alliance, creating a direct link from Berlin to Constantinople and enabling in particular the resupply of the troops in the Dardanelles. By contrast, the Entente’s stock in the Balkans was at its nadir. In Britain David Lloyd George, now minister of munitions, had favoured sending forces to Salonika not Gallipoli at the start of the year. But Gallipoli shelved such ideas. Belatedly, on 5 October, the French and British agreed that they would each contribute 75,000 troops for an expedition to Salonika. The French were keen to find employment for the most obviously republican of their generals, Maurice Sarrail, and so saw the scheme as a means both to moderate the power of Joffre and the army within France and to help the Serbs. But the expedition had three obvious defects. First, its demands would conflict with the operations at Gallipoli, which were still ongoing even if bogged down. Second, such a large force could not reach Salonika until January, by which time the Serbs would probably be defeated. Third, Greece was still neutral. Lloyd George disingenuously argued that ‘there was no comparison between going through Greece and the German passage through Belgium’. 32
Kitchener, the British secretary of state for war, was inclined to agree: for him the purpose of the Salonika expedition was less to help the Serbs than to provoke the Greeks to do so. Those in Greece who favoured intervention, like the prime minister, Eleutherios Venizelos, could hardly mount a convincing case, given the dire position of the Entente at the end of 1915. Greece had refused to honour its obligation to support Serbia when it was attacked by Bulgaria, and King Constantine’s espousal of continued neutrality was entirely pragmatic and realistic. The British cabinet was told that ‘His Majesty’s decided opinion was that Germany was winning on all points, and that there were only two possible endings to European war, either that Germany would be entirely victorious or that the war would end in a stalemate largely in favour of Germany33.’
British and French forces landed at Salonika too late to aid the Serbs and too weak to advance against the Bulgarians. However, Falkenhayn did not attack them. Later he rationalised his actions by arguing that Salonika was an enormous internment camp, a front which tied down French, British and Serb troops, chipping away their strength through malaria, preventing their use in more promising theatres, and committing allied shipping to their supply. In reality his immediate decisions were dictated by the weather and the length of his supply lines. The longer-term considerations concerned Balkan politics. Serbia was crushed. Bulgaria had therefore achieved its principal objective in the war, and there was a danger that it would now seek a settlement. On the other hand, if Falkenhayn encouraged it to advance on Salonika, Greece would be compelled to throw in its lot with the Entente. A passive front in Macedonia allowed him to leave the Balkans to Bulgaria and Austria-Hungary. It seemed that at last he would be able to focus Germany’s efforts on what for him was the principal front, that in the west.
Once again German calculations reckoned without Austria-Hungary. The defeat of Serbia had not resolved Vienna’s Balkan problems. Conrad was furious that it had been achieved principally by German forces, not Austrian. Even when Falkenhayn pulled eight of eleven German divisions out of the Balkan theatre, a German, Mackensen, was left in command. Falkenhayn wanted a joint allied command, but Conrad knew that would mean Austria-Hungary’s subordination to the ‘secret enemy’. He feared that Serbia would become a German or Bulgar fiefdom, and he nicknamed Falkenhayn ‘Ferdinand II’ after the Bulgarian King. Relations between Conrad and Falkenhayn became so bad that for almost a full month, between 22 December 1915 and 19 January 1916, there was no direct communication. In that time strategies for 1916 were set. Conrad planned to mop up Montenegro during the winter and then turn against Italy. In 1915 the two allies had managed to coordinate their actions; in 1916 they diverged. Austria-Hungary’s initial defeat in its war with Serbia had been offset by its share in the wider victory in the east; that wider victory was itself in turn forfeit to the even greater scale of the war as a whole. In shaping its strategy, Germany had identified its enemies’ alliance as a source of weakness, not strength: it was to prove a fatal miscalculation but it was an accurate reflection of Germany’s own experience of coalition warfare.