FIVE
‘IN MILITARY OPERATIONS, time is everything’, wrote Wellington, in 1800, and it was to his perfect judgement of timing that he owed, among his other victories, those of Salamanca and Waterloo.1 Time had also oppressed Schlieffen: time to mobilise, time to concentrate, time to deploy, time to march to the crucial objective. It was his calculations of timing that had persuaded him, and those who inherited his posthumous plans, to wager almost all the force Germany commanded in the west and to let the east wait upon victory over France. Russia’s known weaknesses had convinced Schlieffen and Moltke, his successor, that forty days would elapse before the Tsar’s armies could appear in strength on Germany’s eastern border and so to place their trust in gaining a victory against the clock.
Time is not the only dimension in which war is waged. Space is a strategic dimension also. It had served Russia well in the past, above all in 1812 when Napoleon had led the Grand Army on the long march to Moscow, but Schlieffen and the officers of the Great General Staff had argued themselves into believing in the first decade of the twentieth century that space in the east now worked on their side. The immense distances within the Russian empire, particularly those separating centres of population at which reservists must mobilise, and the relative sparsity of rail connections between such centres and the frontier, suggested to the military technocrats of Germany, and Austria, that tables of mobilisation measured in days by them would take weeks to complete by their Russian equivalents.2
It seemed that space might also be made to work for Germany on its side of the frontier. The division of territories between the three empires of Germany, Austria and Russia, the outcome of the partition of Poland a century earlier, might superficially be regarded to favour the latter in war, for Russian Poland, centred on Warsaw, thrust forward in a great salient between the Carpathian Mountains in Austria to the south and East Prussia to the north, threatening German Silesia and opposed by no serious water obstacle such as those of the River Vistula or the Pripet Marshes that protected Russia’s heartland from invasion. The Polish salient, however, might also be regarded as a region of operational exposure rather than of offensive opportunity, since its flanks were overlapped on either side by difficult terrain. The Carpathians form not only a defensive wall but a chain of dominating sally-ports against invaders from the north-east, while East Prussia, flat though it is as a collectivity, confronts any advancing army with a jumble of lakes and forest that defies the maintenance of order and easy intercommunication among its component units. The Masurian lakeland, home of the sprightly Mazurka, was a region of small communities largely isolated from the outside world, connecting with it by sandy tracks which threatened to reduce the progress of a marching army to a snail’s pace. Beyond Masuria, moreover, lay a chain of German fortresses protecting the populated regions of East Prussia, at Thorn, Graudenz and Marienburg on the River Vistula, matching the Austrian Carpathian fortresses at Cracow, Przemysl and Lemberg (Lvov).3 The Russian high command had long recognised the ambiguous strategic character of the Polish salient, where a bold offensive that threatened Berlin also risked catastrophe should the enemy co-ordinate a scissors movement in the rear, and it had accordingly starved the region of railway and road building that might aid an enemy counter-offensive. It had also cautiously designed two westward strategies, Plan G, that held a strong force in reserve, as well as Plan A, which thrust it forward.
Under French pressure, and out of a genuine desire to do its best by the western ally against the common German enemy, the Russian high command in 1914 was committed to Plan A. Two-fifths of the peacetime army was in any case stationed around the great military centre of Warsaw, from which its strategic deployment against East Prussia and the Carpathians and towards which its reinforcement by the reserves mobilised in the interior might easily be achieved.4 Common sense and intelligence alike dictated that the bulk of Russia’s western forces would have to go south, towards the Carpathians, for Austria-Hungary, unlike Germany, could count on waging a one-front war – the Serbian army appearing at the outset to be of no account – and so deploy its main strength there. Nevertheless, given Germany’s anticipated weakness in the east, sufficient force could be found, by Russian staff calculations, to mount an offensive on the East Prussian frontier that would, while leaving the Austrians with their hands full, assure a crisis for Berlin in its backyard. Since that backyard was also the historic homeland of the German officer corps, dominated as it was by East Elbian landowners, an attack through Masuria towards Königsberg and the other strongholds of the Teutonic Knights from which they sprang would be certain to create in the German high command both material and psychological anxiety in acute degree.
Germany had indeed little left over from the great western Aufsmarsch with which to hold the Prussian heartland. Its war plan allotted only one of its eight armies to the eastern front, the Eighth Army, commanded by General Max von Prittwitz und Gaffron, a Prussian of Prussians, and consisting of the I, XVII and XX Corps, the I Reserve Corps, and the 1st Cavalry Division. All were Prussian-based, the I and I Reserve at Königsberg, seat of the Teutonic Knights, the XVII at Danzig, the XX at Allenstein, the 1st Cavalry Division at Königsberg, Insterburg and Deutsche-Eylau. To the Eighth Army was added on mobilisation a collection of reserve, Ersatz and Landwehr formations, raised from younger and older reservists, which added to it perhaps the strength of a whole corps. The army’s soldiers, many of them recruits or reservists from the threatened area, could be counted upon to fight with tenacity against any invasion of their homeland.
They were, nevertheless, outnumbered by the force the Russian high command had earmarked to mount the East Prussian operations, the First and Second Armies of the North-Western Front. Together these opposed nine corps to Prittwitz’s four, and seven cavalry divisions, including two of the Imperial Guard, to his one. Rennenkampf, commanding First Army, and Samsonov, commanding Second, were moreover both veterans of the Russo-Japanese War, in which each had commanded a division, while Prittwitz had no experience of war at all. Their formations were very big, divisions having sixteen instead of twelve battalions, with large masses of – admittedly often untrained – men to make up losses.5 Though they were weaker in artillery, particularly heavy artillery, than their German equivalents, it is untrue that they were much less well provided with shells; all armies had grossly underestimated the expenditure that modern battle would demand and, at an allowance of 700 shells per gun, the Russians were not much worse off than the French fighting on the Marne.6 Moreover, the Russian munitions industry would respond to the requirements of war with remarkable success. Nevertheless, Russia’s forces were beset by serious defects. The proportion of cavalry, so much greater than that in any other army, laid a burden of need for fodder on the transport service, itself inferior to the German, which the value given by mounted troops could not justify; forty trains were needed to supply both the four thousand men of a cavalry division and the sixteen thousand of an infantry division.7
There were human defects also. Russian regimental officers were unmonied by definition and often poorly educated; any aspiring young officer whose parents could support the cost went to the staff academy and was lost to regimental duty, without necessarily becoming thereby efficient at staff work. As Tolstoy so memorably depicts in his account of Borodino, the Russian officer corps united two classes which scarcely knew each other, a broad mass of company and battalion commanders that took orders from a narrow upper crust of aristocratic placemen.8 The qualities of the peasant soldier – brave, loyal and obedient – had traditionally compensated for the mistakes and omissions of his superiors but, face to face with the armies of countries from which illiteracy had disappeared, as in Russia it was far from doing, the Russian infantryman was at an increasing disadvantage. He was easily disheartened by setback, particularly in the face of superior artillery, and would surrender easily and without shame, en masse, if he felt abandoned or betrayed.9 The trinity of Tsar, Church, country still had power to evoke unthinking courage; but defeat, and drink, could rapidly rot devotion to the regiment’s colours and icons.
Still, they were splendid regiments that marched and rode out in mid-August to invade East Prussia – the Vladimir, Suzdal, Uglich and Kazan Regiments of the 16th Infantry Division, the Lithuanian, Volhynian and Grenadier Regiments of the 3rd Guard Division, the Guard Lancers and Hussars, the Cossacks of the Black Sea – with regimental singers at the head of the column and the regimental kitchens rolling at the rear.10 War had been a tearful wrench, few of the men on the march comprehended why they were marching westward, but the regiment was a sort of village, the officer a sort of squire, and while the decencies of mealtimes and Sunday mass were observed, with the chance of vodka and a village tryst thrown in – Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914 captures unforgettably the mood of the Russian mobilisation – the Tsar’s soldiers moved with a will towards the threat of gunfire.11
They might well have felt confidence. The enormous preponderance of Russian strength – ninety-eight mobilised infantry divisions, thirty-seven cavalry divisions – should have ensured the Stavka, the Russian high command, an overwhelming majority over the German Eighth Army, even after provision had been made to match the forty Austro-Hungarian divisions to the south.12 Or it should, had Rennenkampf and Samsonov been able to move together and keep together. The wings of their armies, aligned respectively to face westward towards Königsberg and northward towards Graudenz, should, with proper handling, have passed deftly inside those two fortress towns and completed a pincer movement that surrounded Eighth Army and secured either its destruction or its precipitate flight to the rear, thus opening West Prussia and Silesia to a deeper Russian invasion.
Geography was to disrupt the smooth onset of the Russian combined offensive in space. Less excusably, timidity and incompetence were to disjoint it in time. In short, the Russians repeated the mistake, so often made before by armies apparently enjoying an incontestable superiority in numbers, the mistake made by the Spartans at Leuctra, by Darius at Gaugamela, by Hooker at Chancellorsville, of exposing themselves to defeat in detail: that is, of allowing a weaker enemy to concentrate at first against one part of the army, then against the other, and so beat both. The way in which geography worked to favour the German’s detailed achievement is the more easily explained. Though eastern East Prussia does indeed offer a relatively level path of advance to an invader from Russia, the chain of lakes that feeds the River Angerapp also poses a significant barrier. There are ways through, particularly at Lötzen, but that place was fortified in 1914. As a result, a water barrier nearly fifty miles long from north to south confronted the inner wings of First and Second Army, so tending to drive them apart. Strategically, the easier option was to pass north and south of the Angerapp position rather than to force it frontally and that was what the commander of the North-Western Front, General Y. Zhilinsky, decided to direct Rennenkampf and Samsonov to do.13
He was aware of the opportunity such a separation offered to the Germans and accordingly took care to provide for the protection of his two armies’ flanks. However the measures taken enlarged the danger, since he allowed Rennenkampf to strengthen his flank on the Baltic coast, which was not at risk, and Samsonov to detach troops to protect his connections with Warsaw, equally not threatened, while arranging for one corps of Second Army to stand immobile in the gap separating it from First. The result of these dispositions was a diversion of effort which left both armies considerably weakened to undertake the main task.14 Having commenced the deployment with a superiority of nineteen divisions against nine, Rennenkampf and Samsonov actually marched to the attack with only sixteen between them.
The Eastern Front in outline, 1914–18
Worse, critically worse, the two armies arrived on their start lines five days apart in time. First Army crossed the East Prussian frontier on 15 August, a very creditable achievement given that the French and Germans were then still completing their concentration in the west, but Second not until 20 August. As the two were separated in space by fifty miles of lakeland, three days in marching time, neither would be able to come rapidly to the other’s assistance if it ran into trouble which, unbeknownst either to Rennenkampf or Samsonov, was the way they were heading.
The superiority of German over Russian intelligence-gathering clinched the issue. Though the Russians knew that they outnumbered the Germans, their means of identifying the enemy’s location were defective. The Russian cavalry, despite its large numbers, did not seek to penetrate deep into the enemy positions, but preferred to dismount and form a firing line when it encountered resistance; and, while the aviation service of the Russian army, with 244 aircraft, was the second largest in Europe, aerial reconnaissance failed to detect German movements altogether.15 The German 2nd Aircraft Battalion, however, and the two airships based at Posen and Königsberg, began to report both the strength and march direction of the Russian columns as early as 9 August, a week before they began to cross the frontier.16 Aircraft and airships would continue to provide vital information throughout the campaign.17
It was the initial intelligence, however, that was decisive. Armed with the knowledge that Rennenkampf led Samsonov by several days – the interval would increase as Samsonov, struggling across the grain of the country and the many small tributaries feeding the Vistula, fell behind schedule – Prittwitz could decide to deploy the bulk of Eighth Army north of the Masurian lakes without undue anxiety. When the Russians opened their offensive with a probing attack at Stallupönen on 17 August, they were driven back. When their main body arrived in strength, at Gumbinnen three days later, the German I Corps was actually advancing to attack them under cover of darkness. The commander, von François, one of the many German officers of Huguenot descent, was as aggressive as he looked, and his troops took their spirit from him. They belonged to some of the most famous of Prussian regiments, the 1st, 3rd and 4th Grenadiers, the 33rd Fusiliers, and fell fiercely on the Russians they found opposite. However, the enemy had prepared overnight trenches and fortified farm buildings and houses. The harder the Germans pressed forward, the higher rose their casualties. The Russian artillery, traditionally the best-trained arm of the Tsar’s army, was well positioned and, firing at close range, added to the carnage. To add to the slaughter, the German batteries of 2nd Division mistakenly but effectively fired on their own infantry. Many sought escape by precipitate retreat and, though eventually rallied, were too shaken to be sent back into the firing line. By mid-afternoon, I Corps had come to a halt. Its neighbouring corps, XVII, commanded by the famous Life Guard Hussar, von Mackensen, who was encouraged by early reports of its success, was meanwhile attacking north-eastward into the Russians’ flank. It did so without reconnaissance which would have revealed that, on its front as on that of von François, the Russians were entrenched. From their positions they poured a devastating fire into the advancing German infantry who, when also bombarded in error by their own artillery, broke and ran to the rear. By late afternoon the situation on the front of XVII Corps was even worse than that on the front of I Corps and the battle of Gumbinnen was threatening to turn from a tactical reverse to a strategic catastrophe. To the right of XVII Corps, I Reserve, under von Below, counter-attacked to protect Mackensen’s flank against a Russian advance. At Eighth Army headquarters, however, even the news of that success could not stay the onset of panic. There Prittwitz was yielding to the belief that East Prussia must be abandoned and the whole of his army retreat beyond the Vistula.
At OHL, Moltke was appalled by the reports of Eighth Army’s sudden predicament, which undermined the whole substance of belief in the possibility of postponing crisis in the east while victory was gained in the west. Only twenty of the vital forty days had elapsed, and Schlieffen’s timetable threatened to crumble before OHL’s eyes. Moreover, the apparent disaster in East Prussia aroused personal anxieties there. It was from its small estates that the army’s inner circle sprang, and Prittwitz’s loss of nerve exposed not just the nation at large but officers’ wives, children and old retainers to the mercies of the enemy. Prittwitz’s staff officers, Hoffman and von Waldersee, succeeded somewhat in stiffening his nerve on 21 August. Moltke, however, had lost confidence in him. Moltke decided first that a director of operations of the first quality must be sent instantly to the east to take charge. He chose Ludendorff, who had twice so brilliantly resolved crises in Belgium. He next determined to dispose of Prittwitz altogether, judging his declared intention to retire behind the Vistula, even if subsequently reconsidered, to be evidence of broken will. In his place he promoted Paul von Beneckendorf und Hindenburg, a retired officer noted for his steadiness of character if not brilliance of mind. As a lieutenant in the 3rd Foot Guards, Hindenburg had been wounded at Königgrätz in 1866 and fought in the Franco-Prussian War. He claimed kinsmen among the Teutonic Knights who had won East Prussia from the heathen in the northern crusades, had served on the Great General Staff and eventually commanded a corps. He had left the army in 1911, aged sixty-four, but applied for reappointment at the war’s outbreak. When the call from Moltke came, he had been out of service so long that he was obliged to report for duty in the old blue uniform that had preceded the issue of field-grey. He and Ludendorff, unalike as they were, the one a backswood worthy, the other a bourgeois technocrat, were to unite from the start in what Hindenburg himself called ‘a happy marriage’.18 Their qualities, natural authority in Hindenburg, ruthless intellect in Ludendorff, complemented each other’s perfectly and were to make them one of the most effective military partnerships in history.
It was, nevertheless, to Ludendorff that Hindenburg looked for an initiative when the two arrived at Eighth Army on 23 August. Its headquarters had moved from Marienburg, ancient commandery of the Teutonic Knights, to Rastenburg, future location of Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair, the day before. On 24 August, the two generals went forward to confer with Scholtz, commanding XX Corps opposite Samsonov’s Second Army, which was advancing to contact after its long flank march but was not yet engaged. Scholtz was nervous, expecting an offensive against him in strength but doubting his troops’ ability to withstand it. He wanted to withdraw. Ludendorff was adamant that he must hold his ground. Assistance would reach him, but not if he retreated away from it. He must stand and fight.
The help on its way had been started forward not by Hindenburg or Ludendorff, but by the superseded Prittwitz who, after recovering from the shock of Gumbinnen, had grasped that François, despite losing 8,000 casualties, had halted Rennenkampff and so freed forces to be used elsewhere. Old war games, some played by Schlieffen himself, had taught Prittwitz’s generation of officers that the correct strategy for defending the East Prussian frontier was to defeat one Russian army one side of the lakes, then use the north-south railway lines to send forces behind them to the other side and repeat the process. With remarkable moral courage and wise advice from his Chief of Staff, Max Hoffmann, he decided that Rennenkampf could be counted as beaten, or at least checked, and, before Hindenburg’s arrival, had already initiated the movement of I and XVII Corps to meet Samsonov on the southern front. Ludendorff did not, therefore, have to devise a plan – though he had already come to the same conclusions as Prittwitz – but merely to endorse one already in execution.
On the Russian side, Rennenkampf correctly sensed that the German forces in front of him were thinning out but inferred that François and Mackensen were withdrawing to the Königsberg fortress on the Baltic coast. That they had departed in haste, loading their troops into rail waggons and leaving only a screen of cavalry and local Landwehr to hold François’s former positions, he did not guess. He believed he was faced with the burden of a deliberate siege of Königsberg, requiring much infantry and a reinforcement of heavy artillery, all taking time to assemble. As to urgent action, he and Zhilinsky, at North-West Front headquarters, had formed the conclusion that the task lay with Samsonov, now breasting up to contact with the Germans south of the lakes, who must be cut off by him from escape across the lower Vistula. To ensure the necessary encircling movement, he was ordered to swing his left wing even further away from Rennenkampf, who was meanwhile probing forward slowly with cavalry and transmitting orders for the planned siege of Königsberg by radio.19
Russian radio insecurity has become part of the legend of the Tannenberg campaign, as the sequence of battles came to be named. In its most sensational form, the story has the radio sections of Rennenkampf’s and Samsonov’s headquarters signalling detailed reports of the two armies’ movements and intentions to each other en clair, to be intercepted and acted upon with deadly effect by their German opposite numbers. The reality is less simple and more mundane. There was a good deal of Russian signalling en clair, but it was a fault of which the Germans were guilty also. The reason, on the Russian side, was not Oblomovian laziness but difficulty in distribution of code books, on the German side lack of time. German operators were pressed and often transmitted uncoded messages on the calculation that they would be missed by listeners, just as they knew their own listeners missed so many Russian messages. ‘Neither instruments nor operators could be spared to scan empty air’, and there was also a shortage of interpreters.20 The East Prussian ether, in late August 1914, therefore crackled with messages of which neither enemy could make use.
On the morning of 25 August, however, Hindenburg had a stroke of luck. Just before his departure from Eighth Army headquarters, he was passed the transcript of a complete Russian First Army order for an advance to the siege of Königsberg which revealed that it would halt some distance from the city on 26 August, well short of any position from which it could come to Second Army’s assistance in the battle he planned to unleash.21 Furnished with this assurance, he met von François, whose corps was just beginning to arrive on Samsonov’s flank, in confident mood. Distance was working for him, the distance separating Samsonov and Rennenkampf’s armies, and so now too was time, the self-imposed delay in Rennenkampf’s advance which, had it been pressed, would have put the First Army well behind the lakeland zone in positions from which it could have marched south to Samsonov’s assistance.
Then François, whose stubborn aggressiveness could take a wilfully unco-operative form, interrupted the smooth unrolling of a plan that should have brought his I Corps, XVII and XX successively into action against Samsonov’s flanks. Claiming that he was awaiting the arrival of his artillery by train, he was slow off the mark to attack on 25 August, and slow again the next day. Ludendorff arrived to energise the offensive, with characteristic effect, but François’s hesitation had meanwhile had a desirable if unintended result. Unopposed in force to his front, Samsonov had thrust his centre forward, towards the Vistula against which he hoped to pin the Germans, thus exposing lengthening flanks both to François, now to his south, and to Mackensen and Scholtz, who were marching XVII and XX Corps down from the north. On 27 August François rediscovered his bite and pushed his men on. Samsonov, disregarding the danger to his rear, pressed on also. On 28 August his leading troops savaged a miscellaneous collection of German troops they found in their path and broke through almost to open country, with the Vistula beyond. Ludendorff, seized by a fit of the nerves his stolid appearance belied, ordered François to detach a division to the broken units’ assistance. François, creatively unco-operative on this occasion, did not obey but drove every battalion he had eastward at best speed. With the weight of Samsonov’s army moving westward by different routes, there was little to oppose them. On the morning of 29 August, his leading infantry reached Willenberg, just inside East Prussia from Russian territory, and met German troops coming the other way. They belonged to Mackensen’s XVII Corps, veterans of the fighting south of the Masurian Lakes, who had been attacking southward since the previous day. Contact between the claws of the two pincers – the units were the 151st Ermland Infantry of I Corps and the 5th Blücher Hussars of XVII – announced that Samsonov was surrounded.22
‘Cauldron’ battles were to be a repeated feature of the fighting in the Second World War, particularly in the east, where in 1941 the German army time and again surrounded Russians by the hundreds of thousands. Victories of encirclement were almost never to be achieved in the First. That was one reason which made Tannenberg – as Hindenburg decided to call the battle, in vindication of the defeat in 1410 of the Teutonic Knights by the Slavs at a place on the 1914 battlefield – so singular. The Germans counted 92,000 Russian prisoners, beside 50,000 enemy killed and wounded. The casualty list, already greatly exceeded in the west, was unremarkable by the standards of campaigns yet to come. The total of prisoners taken would rarely be exceeded in any comparable episode of the war or indeed approached. Tannenberg, as a result, became for the Germans their outstanding victory of the conflict. Not only had it saved the Prussian heartland from occupation by an enemy the German propagandists increasingly chose to depict as ‘barbarian’ – quite unfairly, for the Russian commanders, numbers of whom were Baltic Germans with family connections in East Prussia, had maintained high standards of behaviour among their soldiers – but it had also averted the danger of a deeper advance into industrial Silesia and towards Berlin.23 Tannenberg was a deliverance, and celebrated as such. After the war the colours of the regiments that fought there were displayed in a monumental Tannenberg memorial, modelled on Stonehenge, in which the body of Hindenburg was interred after his death as President. In 1945, when the Russians reappeared in East Prussia in irresistible force, it was disinterred and the monument dynamited. The Tannenberg regiments’ colours now hang in the Hamburg officer cadet school while Hindenburg’s body has been given a final resting place at Schloss Hohenzollern, the seat of the imperial dynasty.24
Tannenberg had a military importance different from its symbolic significance, and far greater. It reversed the timetable of Germany’s war plan. Before the triumph, victory was expected in the west, while the front in the east was to be held as best it might be. After Tannenberg, disaster in the east no longer threatened, while victory in the west continued to elude week after week. Tannenberg temporarily devastated the Russians. Poor Samsonov, overcome by the catastrophe, barely escaped with his life from the battle of encirclement. He did not keep it long. Riding with his officers, he repeatedly expressed despair: ‘The Emperor trusted me. How can I face him again?’25 Finding a means to be alone for a few moments, he shot himself. His body was later recovered, and buried on the family estate. It was a kinder ending than that met by so many of his soldiers, who died anonymously in the undergrowth of the Prussian forests, untended in their last hours, undiscovered in death. Their bones lie there to this day and the news of their passing was communicated to their families only by the expiry of hope. Tannenberg was the beginning of the long agony of the Tsar’s armies which would culminate in their collapse in 1917.
Yet, for all the incompetence of their commanders and inadequacy of their means to fight, the Russians retained resilience, as they were to show time and again in the campaigns of 1915 and 1916. They were to show it immediately in 1914. Despite Samsonov’s collapse, Rennenkampf refused in the aftermath of Tannenberg to accept defeat. When Hindenburg turned against him the whole weight of Eighth Army, now reinforced by the IX and Guard Reserve Corps from the west, he handled his troops with dexterity. It was they who were now outnumbered, despite the arrival of Tenth Army from the rear. First Army, Hindenburg’s target, still only counted nine divisions, against the Germans’ eighteen, but in what came to be called the battle of the Masurian Lakes, launched on 7 September, the same day as the opening of the battle of the Marne, it evaded all Hindenburg’s efforts to organise an encirclement. François, directing the first stage, succeeded in cutting off some units at Lötzen in the heart of the lakeland. Thereafter Rennenkampf conducted a fighting retreat, in and above the lakes, switching units from one flank to another as need arose. On 13 September he crossed back into Russian territory, having extricated his whole army, drawing the Germans behind him. By 25 September delaying actions had allowed him the time and room to organise his own and Tenth Army for a counter-attack and on that day he unleashed it, driving the Germans from their positions, recapturing much of the ground lost and in places returning to the lines reached on the Angerrap during the August invasion.
GALICIA AND SERBIA
The high point of the Masurian Lakes counter-offensive, however, was a tactical rather than a strategic success, for it engaged only a fraction of Russia’s forces. The majority were deployed across the southern face of the Polish salient, facing the Austrians, whose main line of resistance ran along the crests of the Carpathians, through which the strategic passes led down to the Hungarian plain, to the Danube and towards the Austrian heartland. This was an enormous front, 300 miles in length from the junction of the Austrian and Russian borders with neutral Romania to Cracow in Austrian Poland, and defended by large fortifications, of which those at Lemberg (Lvov) and Przemysl had recently been modernised. The Russian war plan required the concentration on this sector of four armies, Third, Fourth, Fifth and Eighth, forming the South-Western Front under General Nikolai Ivanov, on mobilisation. They were to attack as soon as deployed. The Austrians, too, intended to attack as soon as mobilisation was completed. Because of confusion over choice of priorities between the fronts in Galicia and Serbia, however, the Austrians were slower to concentrate their force against Russia than they should have been, while the Russians, defying the German and Austrian staff appreciations, were quicker; their enemies had not made allowance for the fact that two-fifths of Russia’s peacetime strength was stationed in the Polish salient, or for the eventuality that the Stavka would start the troops in Poland forward before general mobilisation had been completed. It was a crucial difference in attitude. The Teutonic general staffs, which had last gone to war over forty years earlier, could not conceive of large-scale operations beginning before everything their war plans stipulated was in place. The less programmatic Russians, with the Japanese War only recently over and the experience before that of decades of frontier fighting in Central Asia, were much readier to improvise. The result was that, by the end of August, the Russians had fifty-three infantry and eighteen cavalry divisions in place on the Austrian front, while the Austrians had only thirty-seven infantry and ten cavalry divisions to oppose them. The Russian formations, moreover, were larger than the Austrian; and while Russia was under pressure from France to mount operations that would divert German forces from the western front to the east, Austria was under even heavier pressure to act in relief of the outnumbered German Eighth Army in East Prussia.
Austria’s principal emotional, if not rational, war aim, however, remained the punishment of Serbia, which had precipitated the July crisis by its involvement in the Sarajevo assassinations. Sense would have argued that Austria deployed its whole strength forward of the Carpathians to engage the Russians, the Serbs’ protectors and great Slav brothers. Outrage, and decades of provocation, demanded the defeat of the Belgrade government and the upstart Karageorgevic dynasty. Conrad von Hötzendorf, the Austrian Chief of Staff, had long had prepared a plan to deal with Serbia alone, a situation known as ‘War Case B’. During 1912–13, however, increasing consideration was given to the likelihood that a crisis with Serbia would precipitate a Russian war, ‘War Case R’, demanding that the Balkan army be reduced to strengthen that in Galicia.26 The General Staff tinkered with the deployment of three groups: the ‘A-Staffel’ that would go to Galicia in the event of a Russian war, the ‘Balkan Group’ that would attack Serbia, and the ‘B-Staffel’ that would participate in either campaign, depending on the promptness of Russian mobilisation. The railway planning section prepared timetables accordingly.
In the event, the Austrians muddled. Conrad, whose hatred of the Serbs was almost pathological, claimed as mobilisation began that Russia’s military intentions were not clear and that it was safe to send B-Staffel to join the Balkan group, which he did. When it became clear that Russia intended to attack in Galicia, which was not only Austria’s strategy also but a solemn duty owed to the Germans, he decided, as he had to, that B-Staffel must go north; but as it was on its way south, and re-timetabling would present difficulties, he allowed it on 1 August to proceed after all and to take part in the attack on Serbia before re-entraining to the Galician front. It was given the mission of making a ‘demonstration’, to draw Serbian forces away from the main axis of the Austrian invasion.
The idea of a demonstration revealed how little the Austrians understood the Serbs’ military qualities. In Vienna they were thought of as backward semi-barbarians. The Serbian officer corps’ participation in the murder and mutilation of the Obrenovic King and Queen in 1903, and the widely reported practice of mutilation of corpses during the Balkan Wars, had led the Austrian army to imagine that a campaign in the Balkans would present little more difficulty than the British or French commonly encountered in their colonial campaigns in Africa or Asia. True, the Serbs had participated in the successful defeat of the Turks in 1912 but the Turks, too, were thought to be backward barbarians. The Austrians, despite the known impassability of Serbia’s terrain, high, forested mountains cut by deep river valleys, with few roads and almost no railways, expected a walkover.
In fact the Serbs, if barbarian in the cruelty with which they waged war, were not militarily backward at all. Their system of conscription mobilised, even if by informal means, a higher proportion of the male population than in any other European country and their soldiers, from boys to old men, were naturally warlike as well as fiercely patriotic. They were also frugal and hardy. Their arms were varied; but every man had a weapon and the first-line units retained most of the modern weapons acquired during the Balkan Wars, including a hundred batteries of artillery and four machine guns per infantry regiment. With a third-line reserve of men aged forty to forty-five and ‘capable soldiers of sixty and seventy, affectionately known as “uncles”’ joining the first and second lines(poziv), Serbia could put 400,000 men into the field, almost as many as those in the Sixth, Fifth and Second Armies of Austria’s B-Staffel.27
The Austrians nevertheless began with an advantage, for the Serbian commander, the voivode (war leader) Radomir Putnik, expected an attack from the north out of Hungary across the Danube towards Belgrade. Instead, Conrad’s plan was for an attack from the west, out of Bosnia, into the salient of Serbian territory enclosed by the Drina and Sava rivers. There was sense in it, for the salient is one of the few areas of level terrain in the whole of the country, and at first the advance, begun on 12 August, went well, benefiting from the Austrians’ ability to attack concentrically, south across the Sava, east across the Drina. Had Putnik hurried his troops forward, they might have been encircled and trapped. The canny veteran – voivode is an honorific given only to generals who have won a victory, as Putnik had spectacularly done against the Turks – declined the risk. Instead he organised his main line of resistance behind the plain, along the River Vardar and the high ground beyond. The defenders did not arrive until the night of 14 August, having force-marched sixty miles in forty-eight hours, but, once in place, brought devastating fire to bear on the attackers at close range. Potiorek, the Austrian commander, signalled Conrad to request the intervention of Second Army, the ‘swing’ formation of the R and B Plans, in order to take pressure off. Conrad refused, despite Potiorek’s report of a ‘frightful heat’ in the fighting.28 He appealed again on 16 August, as the fighting intensified, and a third time on 17 August, when the request was granted, on condition that the ‘swing’ formation’s departure for Galicia was not delayed. The battle on the Drina and Sava now involved the Austrian Fifth and Sixth Armies, part of the Second and the whole of the Serbian, which, driven back and forward by the weight of Austrian artillery fire, always returned to the attack and gradually overbore the Austrians by its persistence. On 19 August the commander of the Austrian Fifth Army had withdrawn it across the Sava. The Second Army made a final, ineffective intervention on 20 August, before departing to join the A-Staffel in Galicia, as it should have done at the start. The Sixth Army had never been properly engaged and joined the general withdrawal. By 24 August the Serbs had expelled the enemy from the whole of their territory.
That was not the end of the fighting in Serbia in 1914. On 6 September the Serbs followed up the victory they had won, and crossed into Austrian territory. It was an unwise manoeuvre and they lost nearly 5,000 casualties when forced to withdraw across the Sava. Later in the month, however, the Serbs found a weak spot in Potiorek’s defences on the Drina, crossed into Bosnia and raced towards Sarajevo, panicking the prison officials there into transferring Gavrilo Princip and his accomplices to the fortress of Theresienstadt in Bohemia. The murderer of the Archduke would die of tuberculosis in April 1918 at Theresienstadt which, in the Second World War, became infamous as ‘the model ghetto’ for elderly, uprooted German Jews, later to be exterminated in the Final Solution. The Serbian occupation of eastern Bosnia lasted only forty days. On 6 November, Potiorek, whose peacetime command Franz Ferdinand had visited Sarajevo to inspect, opened a general offensive with strong reinforcements behind a heavy artillery preparation and, by concentric attack, drove the Serbs back from one line to another in north-eastern Serbia as far as the line of the Morava, eighty miles from the Bosnian frontier. Twice Putnik ordered a general disengagement and retreat, through a worsening winter that covered the hills with three feet of snow. On 2 December the capital, Belgrade, fell and King Peter released his soldiers from their oaths, to go home without dishonour if they chose.29 He announced that he intended to continue the fight and appeared in the front line, carrying a rifle. His example may have marked a turning point. Putnik, believing the Austrians overextended, launched a new offensive on 3 December which broke the Austrian line and in twelve days of fighting drove the enemy clear of Serbian territory. Over 40,000 out of the 200,000 who had campaigned against Serbia since November were lost. The Shvaba, as the Serbs contemptuously nicknamed the Austrians and Germans, would not resume their effort to conquer the kingdom until the autumn of 1915. Then the Serbian epic would take a grimmer turn.
The Battles of Lemberg
The Serbian campaign, however, had never been more than a sideshow to Austria’s great battle on its northern frontier with Russian Poland. There operations had begun with an encounter battle. Both the Austrians and Russians had pre-war plans to attack as soon as deployment was completed. Both marched to the offensive, with varying results. Conrad’s plan was to strengthen his left and attempt an encirclement of the Russian flank in the great Polish plain south of Warsaw, while conducting an ‘active defence’ on his right, in eastern Galicia, where he could use the great fortresses of Lemberg and Przemysl as a buttress. The Russian plan was also for an encirclement in western Galicia but for rather more than active defence in the east. There had been divided counsels on the Russian side, Alexeyev, Chief of Staff of the South-Western Front, favouring the western effort, Danisov, the guiding light of the Stavka, the eastern. A sort of compromise plan for a ‘double envelopment’ was devised, but the Russians, though stronger than the Austrians, lacked the strength to impose equal pressure in both sectors. The opening phase of the Galician battle was, in consequence, to be confused and indecisive.
Yet physical circumstances favoured the Russians. The terrain suited their enormous formations of hard-marching infantry and their plentiful cavalry. So did the geographical features defining the boundaries of the theatre of operations. The Austrian positions on the forward slope of the Carpathians formed a salient, which projected between the River Vistula and its tributary, the San, on the left and the River Dniester on the right. The Vistula, running north, boxed in the Austrians on the left; the Dniester, running south-east, gave the Russians a strong support to any thrust they might make against the Carpathian salient from the right. Geography thus forced the Austrians to advance into a pocket, which the Russians threatened to dominate on two sides while being able to ignore the third.
A major additional disadvantage to the Austrians was the unreliability of parts of its army. This is a much debated matter, over which opinion has swung backwards and forwards ever since the war years. During the war, Allied publicists made much of the disaffection of Franz Josef’s Slav soldiers and of their sense of brotherhood with the Russians on the other side. The readiness of some Slav contingents, particularly Czech and Austrian Serb, to surrender at will was widely reported and the collapse of the Austrian army at the end of 1918 was taken to confirm the truth of Allied propaganda about the intrinsically unstable nature of the empire. There were post-war revisions, arguing that desertions were the exception and that the army as a whole had remained remarkablyKaisertreu; with reason, for no Austrian defeat can be attributed to large-scale disloyalty. Today, opinion seems to have moved to the centre. Of the nine language groups of the army, of which 44 per cent was Slav (Czech, Slovak, Croatian, Serb, Slovene, Ruthenian, Polish and Bosnian Muslim), 28 per cent German, 18 per cent Hungarian, 8 per cent Romanian and 2 per cent Italian, the Germans were always dependable, if some never wholly enthusiastic; the Hungarians, non-Slavs and privileged co-equals, remained reliable until defeat stared them in the face at the end; the Catholic Croats had a long record of loyalty to the empire, which many of them maintained; the Poles, hating the Russians, distrusting the Germans and enjoying large electoral and social privileges under the Habsburgs, were Kaisertreu; the Bosnian Muslims, sequestered in special, semi-sepoy regiments, were dependable; the Italians and the rest of the Slavs, particularly the Czechs and Serbs, lost the enthusiasm of mobilisation quickly.30 Once war ceased to be a brief adventure, the army became for them ‘a prison of the nations’, with the ubiquitous German superiors acting as gaolers.
This was an unhappy destiny for an army which, for much of Franz Josef’s reign, had been a successful and even popular multi-ethnic organisation. Commanded in their own languages, spared the brutal discipline of the Kaiser’s army, prettily uniformed, well-fed, loaded with traditions and honours that ascended to the seventeenth-century Turkish siege of Vienna and beyond, the regiments of the imperial army – Tyrolean Rifles, Hungarian Hussars, Dalmatian Light Horse – made a kaleidoscope of the empire’s diversity and, for three years of a young conscript’s life, provided an enjoyable diversion from the routine of workshop or plough. Annual manoeuvres were a pleasurable summer holiday.31 Regimental anniversaries, when the band played, wine flowed, and the honorary colonel, an archduke, a prince, perhaps the Emperor himself, came to visit, were joyous feasts. The return home, time expired, brought more celebration and adult respect. The reality of war was a distant eventuality.
Reality intruded rapidly and cruelly on the Carpathian front in August 1914. At the first encounter, the Austrians prevailed. They deployed thirty-seven infantry divisions, organised from left to right on a front of 250 miles, into the First, Fourth and Third Armies, with detachments on either flank, and a screen of ten cavalry divisions spread out ahead. The Russians, moving forward in an arc opposite, deployed the Fourth, Fifth, Third and Eighth Armies, comprising in all fifty-three divisions of infantry and eighteen of cavalry. Despite the Russians’ superiority in numbers, Conrad’s first thrust succeeded. His left wing ran into the Russian right at Krasnik, just across the River San inside Russian territory on 23 August, and attacked.32 The leading Austrian formation was the First Army, largely composed of Slovaks from Pressburg (Bratislava) and Poles from Cracow; both Catholic, the Slovaks as yet unpoliticised, the Poles anti-Russian, they fought fiercely for their Catholic Emperor in a three-day battle against the Russian Fourth Army which had come forward without waiting for its reserves.33 The Russian General Staff recorded that, at the opening, ‘the 18th Division fell under violent enemy fire, which obliged the Riazan and Riaysk Regiments to retreat . . . while the 5th Light Infantry were almost encircled’.34 Things went from bad to worse. By 26 August, the Russians had retired twenty miles towards Lublin (where Stalin would establish his puppet Polish government in 1945). On the same day the Austrian Fourth Army encountered the advancing Russian Third at Komarov, just short of the River Bug; again, the Russians were unlucky in the racial composition of the enemy they met: the Austrian II Corps was formed of Vienna regiments, including the capital’s Hoch and Deutschmeister, whose colonel was always the Emperor, in tribute to the dynasty’s association with the Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights; the IX Corps was raised from Sudetenland Germans and the XVI from Hungarian Magyars. No more solidly imperial foundation for an Austrian victory could have been assembled and, after a week of fighting, it had been gained. By the conclusion, the Russians were almost surrounded.
Then the geographical insecurity of the Austrian position began to assert itself. East of Komarov, the frontier with Russia made a sharp turn to run south-eastward towards the border with neutral Romania. Superficially, this flank offered was easily defensible, since a succession of river lines, the Bug, the Dniester and its tributaries, the two Lipas and the Wereszyca, ran behind it at intervals of twenty or thirty miles; the headwaters of the Bug, moreover, were protected by the great fortress of Lemberg (Lvov), with a second even stronger fortress at Przemysl not far in its rear. The Austrian Third Army should, in such terrain, have easily been able to present a strong resistance to the Russians, since the Second Army in Serbia was now sending back to it the divisions attached to the Balkan Group, while the heart of the army itself was the famous XIV Innsbruck Corps, containing the four regiments of Tyrolean Kaiserjäger and their Kaiserschützen reserve battalions. These eagle-feathered mountain sharpshooters were the truest of the true, bearing a particular loyalty to the Emperor, who was colonel-in-chief to all four regiments.
Third Army, however, had been disfavoured by Conrad’s decision to give it an ‘active defensive’ role, while First and Fourth attempted the encirclement of the Russian flank in western Galicia. As a result, it was deployed well inside Austrian territory, some sixty miles behind the frontier, standing on the River Gnita Lipa. There it should have been safe, had it stayed put. On 25 August, however, Brudermann, its commander, learning of the advance of ‘five or six Russian divisions’ westward from Tarnopol, decided to act offensively and moved forward.35 It was the day, moreover, when he lost XIV Corps, called northward to Second Army. By transfers and movements of formational boundaries, his army now consisted largely of Romanians (XII Corps), Slovenes and Italians (III Corps) and local Ruthenian-speaking Ukrainians (XI Corps), more akin to Russians than any nationality within the Habsburg empire.36 Not only was the ethnic mix almost the least Kaisertreu in Franz Josef’s army, the Third Army was also to find itself grossly outnumbered by the Russian Third Army it was advancing to meet. When the encounter came, less than a hundred Austrian infantry battalions, supported by 300 guns, ran headlong into nearly two hundred Russian, supported by 685.37 In three days of fighting in the broken country between the two Lipa rivers, the Austrians were first defeated at Zlotchow, twenty-five miles short of Tarnopol, and then driven back in confusion, sometimes panic; some of the defeated Austrians fled as far as Lemberg.
Had the Russians followed up their victory, the whole of the insecure Austrian wing might have been overwhelmed. Ruzski, the responsible general, did not follow up and Brudermann’s Third Army survived. It was an odd situation, though not unprecedented in war before or since. Each side misappreciated the extent of its own achievements. Ruzski believed he had won no more than ‘a fine defensive success’, and paused to regroup his forces.38 Conrad believed he had won a great victory on the other side of the theatre of operations, that the reverse on Third Army’s front was local and temporary and that, if he reinforced Brudermann, he could further the double envelopment which was the basis of his war plan. By 30 August he had increased Austrian strength opposite Ruzski to a hundred and fifty battalions, supported by 828 guns, largely through the return of most of the Balkan Group to Second Army. Since Ruzski was not advancing, he judged the moment ripe to reopen the offensive, largely with Second Army fighting on Third’s right, the two forming an army group under the successful commander of Second Army, Eduard von Böhm-Ermolli, brought down to energise activity. Under Conrad’s orders, Second Army attacked again on 29 August between the Lipa rivers, this time with results even more disastrous than at first. Russian strength opposite now exceeded three hundred and fifty battalions, supported by 1,304 guns, and, in the ensuing maelstrom, 20,000 Austrians were captured and thousands more killed and wounded.
In the face of all the evidence, Conrad continued to believe he was winning. His local successes on the left wing, the dilatory Russian movement on the right, persuaded him that he could allow Third and Second Armies to make a deep withdrawal behind Lemberg, drawing the Russians after them and then bring Fourth Army down from the north to attack the enemy in flank. The main line of resistance was to be the River Wereszyca, a tributary of the Dniester running southward between Lemberg and Przemysl. He was motivated in part towards this doomed enterprise by a desire to emulate the success of Hindenburg and Ludendorff in East Prussia and by the apparent success of the German armies in the west; the decision for the Lemberg operation was taken before the opening of the battle of the Marne. He was also driven by the growing impatience of his allies with the Austrians’ failure to pull their weight. ‘Our small army in East Prussia’, Kaiser Wilhelm remarked acidly in early September to Conrad’s representative at OHL, ‘has drawn twelve enemy corps against it and destroyed one-half and engaged one half . . . more than this could not be demanded.’ The Kaiser exaggerated; but, since Conrad was opposed at most by fifteen corps, the taunt stung. He was determined to drive his tired and battered armies to victory.39
In the event, the plan nearly worked. The Russians were slow to follow up the abandonment of Lemberg, which they did not enter until 3 September, thus allowing time for the Austrian Fourth Army, exhausted and depleted by losses as it was, to make its advance across the front of the Russian Third Army towards Lemberg. The Third and Second Armies actually won some success on the Wereszyca position, thus delaying for a few days the closure of the Russian encirclement of the Austrian centre, the imminent danger of which was becoming even more evident. The Russians perceived it; on 5 September Alexeyev communicated to Davidov, ‘the vigorous Austrian effort to break our dispositions [north of Lemberg] may be regarded as in paralysis. The moment for announcing our counter-offensive is at hand.’40 Conrad continued to ignore the threat. The Fourth Army marched on until, at Rava Russka, thirty miles north of Lemberg, it fell on 6 September into heavy combat with a concentration of the Russian Third Army and was halted.
Conrad’s efforts to outflank with a weaker force a stronger force that was attempting to outflank him now threatened catastrophe. A huge gap had opened between his First Army still battling against the Russians in the north and his other three, locked in conflict behind Lemberg. He had no reserves of his own and the detachment of a third-line German reserve formation to assist resulted only in severe mauling. The Russians, gathering reinforcements daily, including the Ninth Army which had been assembling near Warsaw, stood with open jaws ready to close on the Austrian Fourth, Third and Second Armies. Sixteen Russian corps now faced eleven Austrian, most of which were bunched in a narrow pocket which the enemy dominated from both sides. First Army, moreover, was suffering a battering it could not resist in its isolated situation to the north, despite the efforts of the alpine troops of XIV Corps, which was fighting as a link formation between the two halves of the Austrian front into which Conrad’s concentration had now been divided. He appealed to the Germans for help; the Kaiser replied ‘Surely you cannot ask any more of [Hindenburg and Ludendorff] them than [they] have already achieved.’41 He forced Second and Third Armies into a renewed offensive in the Wereszyca. When that failed, and with Russian cavalry raiding through the gaps in his line of resistance into the Austrian rear, he had no recourse but to order a general retreat, first to the River San, then to the Dunajec, a tributary of the Vistula only thirty miles east of Cracow, the capital of Habsburg Poland and the greatest city of Catholic Eastern Europe between Vienna and Warsaw. Przemysl, the huge fortress guarding the gaps in the Carpathian chain where the Rivers San and Dniester rise to flow into the Polish plain, had been abandoned, leaving its garrison of 150,000 soldiers surrounded behind Russian lines. Austrian territory to a depth of a hundred and fifty miles had been surrendered. The Habsburg Emperor had lost 400,000 men out of the 1,800,000 mobilised, including 300,000 as prisoners.42 Among the heaviest of the casualties were those that had fallen on the 50,000 men of the XIV Tyrolean Corps, formed of Franz Josef’s four treasured Kaiserjäger regiments, their Kaiserschützen reservists, the 6th Mounted Rifle Regiment and the corps mountain artillery batteries.43 No less than 40,000 had become casualties, a loss that deprived the Austrian army of its best and bravest element, never to be replaced.44 They had paid the price of acting as Conrad’s task force in the crucial effort to hold its front together during the climactic battle around Lemberg.
WARFARE IN THE EAST
The nature of these titanic battles on the Eastern Front is difficult to represent at a human or individual level. The Russian army, 80 per cent peasant when a majority of Russian peasants were still illiterate, left no literature to compare with that of the Western Front. ‘Personal reminiscences are very rare. Nobody collected them’; without amanuenses, the voice of the Russian peasant soldier could not speak to posterity.45 The better-educated Austrians have left equally few recollections of service in the ranks, probably because the disaster of the war was overtaken in personal experiences by the even greater upheaval of the Habsburg empire’s collapse. Intellectuals and artists – Wittgenstein, Rilke, Kokoschka – have bequeathed letters and diaries and at least one classic novel, Hasek’s The Good Soldier Svejk, which is not to be taken as representative of all Habsburg soldiers’ attitude; but they are isolated memorials. Some sense of the imperial army’s ordeal may be caught in the sombre regimental tablets in Viennese churches, still today decorated on regimental anniversaries with ribbons and wreaths. For the most part, however, the experience of the Tsar’s and Austrian Kaiser’s armies in the vast campaigns of movement in 1914 has passed out of memory. Can it be reconstructed?
Photographs help, even if of pre-war manoeuvres; the rarer wartime photographs are more valuable still.46 All show men ranked in deep masses, often shoulder to shoulder. Perhaps they are seeking, in the German phrase, ‘the feel of cloth’, one way men find courage in the face of fire. Long bayonets are fixed to rifles, pouches and accoutrements encumber their movements, thick clothing bulks out their bodies. To bullets it offers no protection. Within a few months, most armies will have adopted the steel helmet, the first reversion to the use of armour since its disappearance in the seventeenth century. The opening months of the First World War marked the termination of two hundred years of a style of infantry fighting which, with decreasing logic, taught that drill and discipline was the best defence against missile weapons, however much improved. Such photographs demonstrate large-scale disobedience of tactical regulations, which in all armies laid down rules of dispersion. In the Russian army, the regulations of 1912 laid down that the lowest unit, the platoon of fifty men, should extend over a hundred paces, that is, with a yard between each soldier.47 At the same time, it prescribed a front of attack for a battalion of 500 yards, which meant that the commander should rank it in four lines of four platoons each. Since those forward would then mask the fire of those behind, it is understandable that regulations should have been discarded and the bulk of the battalion massed in the front line. Such practice obeyed, if not the letter, then the spirit of regulations, which required attacking infantry to build up a ‘superiority of fire’ with an advanced skirmishing line, and its supports then to rush the enemy from a distance of a hundred yards or so. The Austrian army had a similar doctrine.48 The regulations of 1911 insisted that the riflemen of the infantry could ‘without the support of the other arms, even in inferior numbers, gain victory as long as [they] were tough and brave’. This was a view common to the continental armies, German, Austrian and Russian as well as French, the most ideological exponent of the ‘spirit of the offensive’, and was based not merely on affirmation but on an analysis of the nature of recent combat in, particularly, the Russo-Japanese War. It was accepted that high levels of firepower entailed high casualty rates; it was still believed that a determination to accept heavy casualties would bring victory.49
At Tannenberg and Lemberg, therefore, we must imagine the attacking infantry moving, in dense masses, to assault enemy positions held by infantry also densely massed, if behind improvised defences, with the field artillery, deployed in the open at close range behind the firing line, delivering salvoes in direct support. In the Russian army, the 1912 regulations ‘prescribed that fire be delivered in short, rapid bursts, with field guns firing over the heads of advancing infantry’.50 No army had procedures, or indeed the equipment, to correct aim. Telephones were few (Samsonov’s whole army had only twenty-five) and telephone lines were almost automatically broken as soon as combat commenced; communication was by flag or hand signal, or by rumour; regulation of artillery fire was most often effected along human line of sight.51
The 1914 battles in the Eastern Front therefore closely resembled those fought by Napoleon a hundred years earlier, as indeed did those of the Marne campaign, with the difference that infantry lay down rather than stood up to fire and that the fronts of engagement extended to widths a hundred times greater. The duration of battles extended also, from a day to a week or more. The outcomes, nevertheless, were gruesomely similar: huge casualties, both absolutely and as a proportion of numbers engaged, and dramatic results. After Borodino in 1812, a battle of almost unprecedented length and intensity, Napoleon advanced a hundred miles to Moscow; after Lemberg, Conrad retreated a hundred and fifty miles to the outskirts of Cracow.
THE BATTLES FOR WARSAW
The Austrian collapse on the Carpathian front precipitated one of the first great strategic crises of the war. Not only was the Hungarian half of the Austrian empire, beyond the mountain chain, threatened with invasion – the Russian generals were even jauntily discussing among themselves the capture of Budapest, Hungary’s capital – but the territory of heartland Germany suddenly lay under threat of a Russian drive into Silesia, towards the great cities of Breslau and Posen. East Prussia was not out of danger, while at the far southern end of the front, Brusilov, best of the Russian generals, was menacing the Carpathian passes. Even Moltke, worn down as he was by the evident failure of the Schlieffen Plan, could find time to turn his attention from the battle of the Aisne to the affairs of the Eastern Front, and on his last day as Chief of Staff, before his supersession by Falkenhayn on 15 September, he telephoned Ludendorff to order the formation of a new ‘southern’ army, southern because it was to concentrate south of East Prussia, to fill the gap between the victorious Eighth Army and the crumbling Austrians. Ludendorff, who was as alarmed as Moltke by the worsening situation, made the counter-proposal that the new army incorporate most of Eighth Army’s troops, but that was a step Moltke lacked the energy to take. His successor did not hesitate. As incisive in mind as he was imposing in appearance, Falkenhayn, on 16 September, announced that most of Eighth Army would leave East Prussia to join the new army, numbered the Ninth, with Ludendorff as Chief of Staff and Hindenburg as commander; Hoffman, their operations officer during the Tannenberg battle, would join in that post. On 18 September Ludendorff motored to meet Conrad and agree with him a new plan to avert the danger under which the Austro-German front lay. The Ninth Army, instead of standing to await a Russian offensive into Silesia, would attack across the upper Vistula and drive towards Warsaw, the Russian centre of operations on the Polish front.52
The Russians, however, had plans of their own. During September, in fact, they had too many plans, the supreme command, the Stavka, having one, and the North-Western and South-Western Fronts others. The Russian General Staff reports record ‘dissension between [them], resulting in different directives’.53 The North-Western Front, now commanded by Ruzski, was, by his estimation, dangerously exposed as a result of the German successes in East Prussia and must retreat a long way, perhaps as far as the River Niemen, a hundred miles east of the Masurian Lakes; if necessary, Warsaw itself must be abandoned. The South-Western Front, by contrast, wanted to press its victorious pursuit of the Austrians westward towards Cracow. The Stavka had a radical alternative: the bulk of the Russian force on the Eastern Front would disengage, concentrate around Warsaw and the great fortress of Ivangorod, upstream on the Vistula, and then launch a concerted offensive towards Silesia, with the purpose of taking the war directly into Germany.
All these plans, though particularly those of Ruzski and the Stavka, characterise a distinctively Russian style of warmaking, that of using space rather than force as a medium of strategy. No French general would have proposed surrendering the cherished soil of his country to gain military advantage; the German generals in East Prussia had taken the defence of its frontier to be a sacred duty. To the Russians, by contrast, inhabitants of an empire that stretched nearly 6000 miles from the ploughland of western Poland to the ice of the Bering Straits, a hundred miles here or there was a trifle of military manoeuvre. In their wars with the Turks, the Swedes, above all with Napoleon, whole provinces had been lost, only to be regained when distance and the durability of the peasant soldier defeated the invader. As in 1812, so in 1914; to give ground now would be to repossess it later, and all to the enemy’s disadvantage. By 23 September, the Stavka had acquired clear intelligence that the German Ninth Army was concentrated in Silesia and was advancing towards Warsaw. The Grand Duke Nicholas, who had now taken control of the Stavka, accordingly decided to withdraw most of his forces from contact and await the German advance. Meanwhile, Brusilov would be left to menace the eastern Carpathians, while the Tenth Army would be despatched to mount a new offensive against East Prussia. When Hindenburg’s and Ludendorff’s Ninth Army appeared in the centre, the Russian Fourth and Ninth Armies would advance from Warsaw to oppose it, while the remainder of the Stavka’s strategic mass, Second, Fifth and First Armies, would sweep down to take it in flank.
This was war on a titanic scale, as large in numbers committed as in the west and larger by far in terms of space and depth of movement than in any of the operations in that comparatively constricted theatre. The Russians, who were beginning to receive important reinforcements from distant Siberian military districts, successfully transferred most of their units engaged in the Carpathians to the Warsaw area in late September, without attracting the enemy’s attention; the Austrians, finding their front had been thinned out, followed, but to their eventual disadvantage. All they gained thereby was the chance to relieve the garrison of Przemysl on 9 October, soon to be surrounded again when they paid the penalty of joining the Germans in Ludendorff’s ill-conceived offensive towards Warsaw. The Stavka also enjoyed the satisfaction of watching the Russian Tenth Army return to the fray on the East Prussian frontier. Though, in the battle of Augustow (29 September – 5 October), its attack was held, its intervention caused Hindenburg and Ludendorff considerable alarm. Eighth Army, overconfident after the glory of Tannenberg, had not bothered to entrench its positions and the Russians achieved some easy tactical successes before they were checked.
By early October there were really four fronts in the east: from north to south, a German-Russian front on the eastern border of East Prussia; an Austro-German-Russian front on the Vistula; a Russian-Austrian front on the San; and a Russian-Austrian front in the eastern Carpathians. The whole extent, from the Baltic to the Romanian border, was nearly 500 miles, though with a gap of 100 miles in the north between Warsaw and East Prussia, thinly screened by cavalry. It was in the centre, however, where the Vistula flows northward from Ivangorod to Warsaw that the drama of a true war of movement, greater than any seen in Europe since the campaign of Austerlitz, was unfolding. There two complementary outflanking offensives were in motion: the German Ninth Army was marching down the west bank of the Vistula, Hindenburg and Ludendorff believing that the Russians were not in strength near Warsaw and could be encircled from the north; the Russians were preparing to cross the Vistula from the east below Ivangorod, to which the Austrians had imprudently advanced, and to march up above Warsaw, there to launch their own outflanking movement against Hindenburg and Ludendorff.
Had the Germans had any better means of mobility than the feet of their soldiers and horses they might have pulled off the manoeuvre: Hitler’s eastern marshals, twenty-five years later, would have thought the circumstances ideal for an armoured encirclement; but the Kaiser’s generals had no such means. Worse, the Russians had superiority of numbers: from Warsaw to Przemysl they deployed fifty-five infantry divisions against thirty-one Austrian and thirteen German.54 When Ludendorff appreciated, on 18 October, that the Ninth Army was in imminent danger of defeat if he pushed it on towards Warsaw, he decided to withdraw it. Conrad, who had followed the Russians’ deliberate retreat from Przemysl to the San, was less prudent. He tried to attack towards Ivangorod on 22 October, was defeated and on 26 October was forced to retreat; Przemysl, with its garrison of 150,000 men, was left surrounded for a second time, an Austrian island in a sea of Russians, while 40,000 soldiers of Conrad’s First Army were killed, wounded or captured. The Austrians ended up near Cracow, whither they had been pushed after their defeat in the Galician battles of August, the Germans only fifty miles from Breslau in Silesia, near their starting point for the march on Warsaw.
WINTER BATTLES IN GALICIA AND THE CARPATHIANS
The battle of Warsaw was an undoubted Russian victory. Though it had not resulted in the encirclement the Stavka sought, it demonstrated the Russians’ superiority in the warfare of manoeuvre and even in the strategy of deception. Despite an alleged German advantage in radio interception, it was Ludendorff who had been surprised by the Russian redeployment along the Vistula from Ivangorod to Warsaw, which had been carried out with speed and in secrecy. The question remained for the Russians: what to do next? The Stavka was not in doubt. It would resume its planned offensive, delayed by the German Ninth Army’s thrust towards Warsaw, and on 2 November issued the necessary directive.55 The continuing arrival of reinforcements from the Siberian, Central Asian and Caucasian military districts supplied the necessary force. As soon as dispositions had been made, the central mass, consisting of the Second and Fifth Armies, would press forward through Breslau and Posen towards Berlin. Meanwhile the southern armies would also go over to the offensive between Cracow and Przemysl, with the aim of ‘completing’ the destruction of the Austrian forces in Galicia and the Carpathians.56
There were two impediments to this plan, particularly as they affected the central offensive. The first was the doubtful ability of the Russians to move their troops at the required speed to the point of encounter with the enemy. During the manoeuvre which had brought the Russian mass so skilfully to Warsaw and Ivangorod in October, the Stavka had been able to utilise the comparatively extensive rail network of central Poland. Western Poland, however, had deliberately been deprived of railways as a defensive measure; there were only four east-west lines and only two rail crossings over the Vistula.57 Moreover, during their retreat from Warsaw the previous month, the Germans had destroyed the rail network behind them for a depth of a hundred miles. The second impediment was positive rather than negative. Ludendorff was himself planning a resumption of the offensive, this time from bases further to the rear than in October, but with the same object: to take the Russians in flank in the plains of western Poland and cut them off from their Warsaw base. Making use of the undamaged rail link between Silesia and Thorn, the old fortress city standing on the Vistula at the point it entered German territory in West Prussia, he relocated thither the whole of Ninth Army by 10 November. It consisted of eleven divisions, including reinforcements brought urgently from the Western Front at the demand of Hindenburg who, on 1 November, had become Commander-in-Chief in the east.58
Ninth Army attacked on 11 November, hitting V Siberian Corps in its over-extended and unfortified positions with a great weight of artillery. A gap of thirty miles was quickly opened between the Siberians and the rest of the army to which it belonged, Second, which had already advanced some distance towards the German frontier.59 Although the Germans were outnumbered by the Russians on this front, by twenty-four divisions to fifteen, they had the advantage and pressed on. It was only on the fourth day of their offensive, sometimes called the Second Battle of Warsaw, that the Stavka realised it had a crisis on its hands; fortunately, it recognised almost simultaneously that the situation could be saved only by precipitate retreat. It ordered a disengagement, which was carried out with great efficiency. In two days of forced march, the Russian Second Army fell back on the great cotton-weaving town of Lodz, a railway centre stuffed with supplies. It was now the Germans’ turn to be on the wrong foot. Russian outflanking forces appeared from north and south and three German reserve divisions were for a time surrounded.60 They were extricated with difficulty; so confident was the Stavka of collaring them that trains had been sent to Lodz to take their soldiers into captivity.
The battle of Lodz ended on 23 November neither as a Russian defeat nor as a German victory. Ludendorff managed to represent it as a victory all the same and so extract from Falkenhayn the transfer of four German Corps from west to east, the II, III Reserve, XII and XXI Reserve, for use on the northern sector of operations as the Tenth Army; another corps, XXIV Reserve, arrived from France to join the Austrians on the southern sector. The reinforcements deployed in the north were misused. During December they were committed to a series of frontal assaults which achieved the fall of Lodz on 6 December but then petered out after an advance of some thirty miles to the rivers Rawka and Bzura, little tributaries of the Vistula south-west of Warsaw. There the terrain is excellent for offensive operations, wide, unobstructed farming land where, in 1939, the Polish army would achieve its only successful counter-attack against Hitler’s Blitzkrieg.61 It is also well-suited to defence, if troops will dig, and the Russians were excellent at digging. Confronted by their trenches, the Germans dug also, so that the coming of winter found the central sector of the Eastern Front completely immobilised. It would remain frozen, militarily as well as physically, until the following summer.
In the south the arrival of the German reinforcements, particularly the 47th Reserve Division of XXIV Reserve Corps, was to achieve quite different results. During November the Austrians had rallied, despite their earlier setbacks and the terrible losses those entailed, and had staged a series of counter-attacks around Cracow. Joined by the right wing of the German Ninth Army, now commanded by Mackensen in place of the promoted Hindenburg (his and Ludendorff’s theatre headquarters was known as OberOst), and reinforced by Böhm-Ermolli’s Second Army from the Carpathians, they succeeded, in confused fighting and at great cost, in gaining ground north of the Vistula between Cracow and Czestochowa, holy city of the Polish people. The Russian South-Western Front Armies – Second, Fifth, Fourth, Ninth, Third and Eleventh – were present in greater strength, however, and were able to bring up reinforcements. After ten days of fighting, which began on 16 November, Conrad had to accept defeat and draw his troops back to positions closer to the German border than those from which he had started. South of Cracow things ended worse. Because the front in the Carpathians had been stripped of troops for the Cracow-Czestochowa offensive, the five main passes through the mountains stood exposed to a Russian advance. Brusilov captured the Lupkow pass on 20 November and by 29 November Boroevic, his Austrian opponent, faced the prospect of an enemy offensive against Budapest.
Then the Austrians’ fortunes quite unexpectedly changed for the better, the result of their taking a well-judged initiative at a moment when material circumstances particularly disfavoured the enemy. Indecision, to which the Russian high command was so prone, further aided the Austrian initiative. On 29 November the Grand Duke Nicholas summoned Ruzski and Ivanov, the two Front commanders, to the Stavka’s headquarters at Siedlce, to discuss future operations. They disagreed, as they had done so often before. Ruzski wanted to withdraw the North-Western Front, because of the losses it had suffered at Lodz, to Warsaw. Ivanov, by contrast, scenting opportunity in the setbacks he had inflicted on the Austrians on the Cracow-Czestochowa line, wanted to regroup his forces and return to the offensive. ‘The way to Berlin lies though Austria-Hungary’, he argued.62He got his way; but his freedom of action depended not upon the permission of the Grand Duke but on availability of supplies and reinforcements. Reinforcements were plentiful, as many as 1,400,000 recruits having been inducted between October and November, but they were untrained and many lacked weapons. Munitions were severely deficient. Russian factories had not yet achieved the levels of output they would in 1915 and, with the White Sea closed by ice, and the Baltic and Black Seas by the enemy navies, there were no imports. The artillery was rationed to ten rounds per gun per day.
Conrad struck while these circumstances prevailed. He had perceived a weak point at the junction of the Russian Third Army, south of Cracow, with Brusilov’s Eighth Army in the Carpathians where, between the towns of Limanowa and Lapanow, a gap of nearly twenty miles yawned. Opposite he assembled the best of the troops available to him, the German 43rd Division and the Austrian XIV Corps. The German division was fresh, the XIV Corps was not. Thousands of its Tyrolean riflemen had been killed in the September fighting near Lemberg and the reserves to replace the losses had been hard to find. Surprise, nevertheless, was on the side of the task force and on 3 December it struck. In four days of fighting the Russians were pushed back forty miles. Then enemy reinforcements began to appear and on 10 December Conrad’s drive was halted. It had, nevertheless, allowed Boroevic to go over to the offensive in the Carpathians and to secure new and stronger positions on the forward mountain slopes. As a result, the battle of Limanowa-Lapanow not only blocked Ivanov’s plan to thrust past Cracow towards Germany but also punctured the Russian dream of an advance on Budapest. It was therefore in its effects a double victory, nullifying the strategies both of a direct invasion of German territory and of an indirect victory over Germany through the defeat of Austria-Hungary.
Yet, though a victory, Limanowa-Lapanow was also a last gasp. Never again would the Imperial and Royal Army unilaterally initiate a decisive operation or deliver a conclusion an Austrian commander could claim as his own. Thereafter, whether in the conflict with Russia or in the coming war with Italy, its victories – Gorlice, Caporetto – would be won only because of German help and under German supervision. As it was, the army’s victory at Limanowa owed much to the loan of German troops. Henceforward it would always fight as the German army’s junior and increasingly failing partner. That was in large measure the result of its having entered the conflict with insufficient numbers to engage in mass warfare and of then suffering disproportionate losses. All the combatant armies had by December lost numbers that would have seemed unimaginable in July 1914. The Russian field army had been reduced from 3,500,000 men on mobilisation to two million; but it had perhaps ten million unconscripted men yet to call to the colours.63Austria-Hungary, by contrast, had lost 1,268,000 men out of 3,350,000 mobilised but had less than a third as many potential replacements; the official figure put the number at 1,916,000.64 Many, moreover, were reluctant servants of empire and would prove growingly so as the war prolonged. The valiant mountain men of the Tyrol and Vorarlberg had given almost their all before the end of 1914; the Germans of Austria proper had also suffered heavily, as had the warlike Magyars of the Kingdom of Hungary; the Emperor’s Slavs would prove an increasingly doubtful quantity. The original setback in Serbia had been blamed on the half-heartedness of the VII Corps and its 21st Division, almost wholly Czech, in particular. During the fighting with the Russians, the Czechs of IX Corps were suspected of large-scale desertion to the enemy. The steadfastness of the army was further undermined by the very heavy losses suffered at the outset among its regular officers and long-service NCOs. It was on its way towards becoming what the Austrian official history would itself call ‘a Landsturm [second-line] and militia army’.
What that presaged was revealed when, the month after Limanowa-Lapanow, Conrad attempted to repeat the success further east in the Carpathians. He did so in concert with the Germans, who were meanwhile preparing an offensive of their own in Masuria to quash for good the Russian threat to East Prussia, and was lent three German divisions – 3rd Guard, 48th Reserve and 5th Cavalry – for his effort. The plan was to attack in the lower Beskid range, where the German formations were to break through and then wheel outwards in both directions, assisted by Austrian divisions on the flanks. Conditions did not favour success. The Beskids rise to 8,000 feet, then had few roads and are covered by deep snow in winter. The Germans, moreover, were ill-equipped for mountain operations. It was not surprising that the offensive, which began on 23 January, made little headway. What was surprising was the early success of the Austrians who, in the battle of Kolomea, drove the Russians down the eastern slopes of the Carpathians and reached Czernowitz at the junction of the Austrian-Russian-Romanian border. The territorial gains made were shallow, however, and a renewal of the offensive on 27 February was rapidly checked by Russian resistance. The Austrians lost over 90,000 men in these operations, without blunting Russian effectiveness.65 During March the Russians counter-attacked whenever opportunity offered, against an enemy worn down by the harshness of the elements and the fruitlessness of its own efforts. General von Kralowitz, Chief of Staff of the Austrian X Corps, reported ‘men already cut to pieces and defenceless . . . Every day hundreds froze to death; the wounded who could not drag themselves off were bound to die . . . there was no combating the apathy and indifference that gripped the men.’66
With the failure of these winter counter-offensives in the Carpathians, the morale of the enormous Austrian garrison of Przemysl, surrounded since October for the second time, collapsed. Its relief had been a primary object of the January operation. When that and its renewal in February failed, the commander of the fortress, after attempting a sortie that a British officer attached to the Russians described as a ‘burlesque’, demolished as much of the fortifications as had survived Russian bombardment, blew up his artillery and munitions, burnt his supplies and, on 22 March, surrendered.67 Two thousand five hundred officers and 117,000 soldiers passed into Russian captivity.68 The officers, whom the British observer described as having ‘a prosperous and well-fed look’, at first suffered little thereby; an artist of the Illustrated London News depicted them sharing the cafés of the city with the conquerors, sitting at separate tables but exchanging salutes on entry and departure as if by the protocols of eighteenth-century warfare.69
In Masuria neither the Russians nor the Germans were in a mood for civilities. There the Russian Tenth Army still occupied the strip of East Prussia taken in the battle of Augustow at the end of September and the Germans were determined to retake it. There was more to their plan, however, than a hope of local success. It had two larger objects. The first was an encirclement of the Russian Tenth Army between Masuria and the forest of Augustow, last of Europe’s primeval wildernesses; the second was a wider encirclement of the whole Russian position in Poland, in concert with the Austrians’ offensive in the Carpathians. Falkenhayn had wanted neither operation, since both required reinforcements he preferred to husband for his continued effort in the west, but he was overborne by Hindenburg who, though his subordinate, enjoyed direct access to the Kaiser since his Tannenberg triumph. The troops were found, largely because of the German army’s superior ability to create new formations from its existing structures. While the Russians and the Austrians merely made good losses as best they could with often untrained recruits, the Germans subdivided first-line divisions, upgraded second-line formations and organised new divisions out of reserves and fresh classes of conscripts. In this way, during November 1914, it created eight new divisions for the Eastern Front from the replacement battalions of the military districts, numbered 75–82; though they had a strength of only nine rather than the standard twelve infantry battalions, these new divisions were as strong in artillery as the old and actually anticipated the nine-battalion organisation which would become the norm throughout the army later in the war.70
The ‘Winter Battle in Masuria’, with the 75th, 76th, 77th, 78th, 79th and 80th Divisions in the vanguard, opened on 9 February 1915. Two armies, the old Eighth which had won Tannenberg and a new Tenth, attacked from north and south of the lake belt, broke through in terrible weather – snow, fog and bitter cold – and quickly threatened the Russians with encirclement. The Russian infantry, whose entrenchments were primitive and who were, as was common practice, badly supported by artillery commanders more concerned to save their guns than stand by the ‘cattle’ at the front, fought back but were progressively encircled.71 Russian intelligence was poor, consistently underestimating the strength of the Germans; the high command, which had provided the isolated Tenth Army with no reserves, complacently assured Sievers, its commander, that the Twelfth Army, far to its south, would solve its problems. He had warned, before the storm broke, that ‘nothing can prevent [my army] from being exposed to the same fate as [Rennenkampf’s] in September’.72 No notice was taken by his superiors, so that, by 16 February, another Tannenberg did indeed threaten. Bulgakov’s XX Corps found itself penned into an increasingly constricted sector of the Augustow forest, by attacks so fierce that a principal casualty was the surviving stock of auroch, Europe’s last wild bison.73 The German pincers closed on 21 February, when Bulgakov surrendered with 12,000 men. The Germans claimed over 90,000, but the majority of Tenth Army’s soldiers not killed or wounded in the fighting had in fact escaped through the forest. There had not been a second Tannenberg but East Prussia had been liberated from the danger of Russian invasion for good – at least in this war.
The winter battle in the Carpathians promised no such clear-cut result. There, in continuance of the efforts at Limanowa in December and in the Beskid mountains in January, the Austrians and their German loan troops renewed the attack in February, only to find the Russians respond with unexpected energy. Conrad, the Austrian Chief of Staff, began the offensive with the twin aims of relieving pressure on the surrounded Przemysl garrison and of winning a success that might deter Italy, increasingly emboldened by Austrian setbacks, entering the war on the Allies’ side. The terrain and the weather in the Carpathians inflicted setbacks and terrible suffering on Conrad’s soldiers, who froze and starved amid the steep valleys and forests. The Russian formations, which included a corps of Finns, perhaps the hardiest soldiers in Europe, were less affected. They answered Conrad’s effort at an offensive with a counter-offensive of their own in late March which, despite the arrival of three German divisions, 4th, 28th Reserve and 35th Reserve, to the Austrians’ aid, pressed forward. By the beginning of April, the Russians dominated the Carpathian front and, despite losses throughout their army totalling nearly two million since the war’s outbreak, were again contemplating a breakthrough over the crests to the Hungarian plains, with results decisive for the whole eastern campaign, as soon as better weather came. The Austrians, whose losses in the first three months of 1915 added 800,000 to the 1,200,000 already suffered in 1914, were at their last gasp.74 Without massive German help, whatever price was to be paid for that by way of political dependency and national prestige, the Habsburg empire faced a culminating crisis.