A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (40 page)

The new face of war: a German
Uhlan,
or lancer, could seem a figure out of ancient legend except for the mask that protects him from poison gas.

Chapter 13

The Search for Elsewhere

“I can only love and hate, and I hate General Falkenhayn.”

—E
RICH VON
L
UDENDORFF

N
ineteen-fifteen opened repetitiously and prophetically, which is to say that it opened with lethal violence on the grand scale. On New Year’s Day, in the English Channel, a German submarine fired a torpedo into the hull of the British battleship
Formidable
and sent 546 seamen to their deaths. On the continent the French were on the offensive, or trying to be, all along their long front: in Flanders, the Argonne, Alsace and, most bloodily of all, the Champagne region west of Verdun. In the east, under appalling winter conditions that were causing hundreds of men nightly to freeze to death in their sleep, the Russians were slowly forcing the armies of Austria-Hungary back into the Carpathian passes that separated the plains of Galicia from the Hapsburg homeland. Beyond Europe, on the ice-packed heights of the Caucasus Mountains, the Russians and the weather together were destroying a badly led and ill-equipped army of Turks. There was bloodshed in Africa, in Asia, in the South Pacific, and in the South Atlantic—in improbable places all around the world.

All the belligerents were locked in a situation for which they were woefully unprepared. In the last five months of 1914 more than eight hundred thousand Germans had become casualties, and more than a hundred thousand of them were dead. French and Austro-Hungarian casualties were in the million-man range, Russia’s total approached twice that, hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen were listed as dead or missing, and more than half of the Tommies who had come over in August were dead or injured. In every country the shock was numbing. A monument in a single Parisian church, Notre Dame des Victoires, displays the names of eighty parishioners killed in battle between August and December.

The worst of it was that this carnage had not come close to producing a decision. In every country shattered armies had to be rebuilt and expanded and sent out to do it all again. Some of the leaders—none more than Joffre of France and Britain’s Sir John French—continued to believe that victory lay just ahead and could be achieved with one or two more effusions of sacrificial blood. Others—Falkenhayn in Germany, Kitchener in Britain—were able to see that a long and terrible struggle lay ahead. For all of them, optimists and pessimists alike, one question had become paramount:

What do we do now?

All the camps but two, France and Austria-Hungary, were deeply divided over how to answer. In Paris the dominating fact was German occupation of a huge expanse of the French homeland: regions that included 14 percent of the nation’s industrial workforce, two-thirds of its steel production, 90 percent of its iron mines, and 40 percent of its sugar refineries, along with substantial parts of its coal, wool, and chemical output. This made it easy for the French to agree on one great goal: to drive the Germans out, blast them out, burn them out, break their defensive line by any means possible and throw them back across the Rhine. More than in any of the other warring nations, only one man’s opinion mattered. That man was “Papa” Joffre. Exclusive authority over questions of strategy had been in Joffre’s hands from the start. If some were skeptical about the wisdom of trusting Joffre to such an extent, if calls for his removal had erupted during the weeks when his armies were in seemingly endless retreat, the Marne had silenced the doubters even if it had not entirely removed their doubts. Ambiguous as the victory may have been in terms of who had actually made it possible and what it meant for the long term, the simple fact that Joffre had been in command elevated his prestige to a level at which it was, and would long remain, above challenge. As shocking as Joffre’s losses continued to be, his appetite for more of the same was undiminished. He remained certain that the war could still be a fairly short and glorious one, and he was determined to make it so.

A similar absence of disagreement pervaded official Vienna, but not because of any such high expectations. Austria-Hungary was forced into near-unanimity by sheer desperation. Its losses were particularly serious because the dual monarchy had less than a third of Russia’s manpower to draw upon in trying to make whole its ravaged armies. Field Marshal Conrad’s offensives into Galicia and Serbia had literally wiped out some of his most elite units, demoralized many of the survivors, and multiplied the difficulties of maintaining the enthusiasm of the empire’s non-German majority. With Serbia unbeaten, with Russia continuing to advance, and with Italy’s possible entry into the war on the side of the Entente, Austria-Hungary had only one possible first priority: to somehow keep the Russians from getting through the Carpathians. Achieving this goal was almost certain to require help from the Germans. The Austrians were already incapable of accomplishing anything of consequence without Berlin’s assistance.

Conrad, rarely reluctant to engage the enemy, announced plans for a winter campaign aimed at driving the Russians back from the Carpathians and relieving the besieged fortress of Przemysl. He hoped, through a persuasive show of force, to discourage Italy, Romania, and Bulgaria (all of which were eager for a share in the spoils of war but uncertain of which side could make the best offer) from joining the Entente. He asked the Germans to contribute four divisions—upward of sixty thousand troops—to this offensive. In doing so he put his allies on the spot. Nobody in the German high command supposed that Conrad was capable of moving effectively against the Russians without assistance, and nobody was confident that he could succeed even if his request was granted. On the other hand his plan was far from pointless; if he did nothing but wait for the Russians to attack, the results could be disastrous. Falkenhayn had at his disposal four new corps, more than a hundred thousand well-equipped recruits led by experienced officers and noncoms. A struggle immediately erupted over how and where to use them.

What to do about Austria—the question that was, as Ludendorff told Falkenhayn, Germany’s “great incalculable”—was only one of the puzzles facing the Germans as the winter deepened. They had not only the entire Western Front to deal with, the relentlessly growing French and British armies, but also a Russian steamroller that despite its huge losses continued to outnumber the German and Austrian forces in the east by overwhelming margins and was obviously preparing to resume the offensive. The Germans had no simple or obviously right way to balance these dangers and distribute the available resources—no clear way to victory on either front, never mind both. Nor were the leaders of the government or army agreed on what should be done. Their differences were so fundamental that they threatened the entire German war effort with paralysis.

Falkenhayn, the handsomely youthful-looking Junker who was now both chief of the general staff and war minister, appeared to have all the power needed to decide questions of strategy. And he knew what he wanted to do. Alarmed by the losses of 1914—he described his army as “a broken instrument”—he was convinced that Germany had no chance of defeating all the forces arrayed against it. A negotiated peace on one front or the other was therefore necessary. In the west, Falkenhayn believed, an acceptable peace could never be achieved without British acquiescence; the English Channel made Britain unconquerable, and the only way to bring it around was to take one of its allies out of the war. As for the east, the size of the front and of the Russian armies made victory improbable within a tolerable period of time. The answer, Falkenhayn thought, was to punish the Russians enough to make them receptive to an eventual settlement while focusing all possible force on the defeat of the French, whom he described as a sword in the hand of the British. “If we succeed in bringing Russia to terms,” he said, “we could then deal France and England so crushing a blow that we could dictate peace terms.”

He was unwilling to send to the east any troops that might usefully be used in the west, and he was similarly unwilling to thin his forces in East Prussia for the benefit of Conrad. This put him at odds with Hindenburg and Ludendorff. Both men—Ludendorff most importantly, because he and Max Hoffmann were the brains of the team—saw opportunities to crush the Russians. Whether out of strategic conviction or jealousy or some mixture of the two, both were contemptuous of Falkenhayn. And though Falkenhayn’s two offices made him doubly the superior of Hindenburg and Ludendorff and every other member of the German high command, his credibility had been damaged by his failure to break through at Ypres even after expending so many lives. Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes had raised Hindenburg to heights of popular adulation comparable to those occupied by Joffre in France. He was not inclined to use his prestige to help or support Falkenhayn. Prodded by Ludendorff, he undercut Falkenhayn at every opportunity, spoke openly of Falkenhayn’s unfitness for the positions he occupied, and encouraged his admirers at court and in the government to do likewise. Falkenhayn, not surprisingly, responded in kind.

Things should have been simpler for the Russians because they, like the French and British, had only one truly dangerous enemy to contend with. But they too were divided and uncertain. The chief of the Russian general staff, the tsar’s six-foot-six and stick-figure-thin cousin and namesake the Grand Duke Nicholas Romanov, was a competent commander. He was also aggressive and determined to use the massive forces at his disposal to invade Germany and win the war in the east. But his political position was not strong. He despised the monk Rasputin, once informing him that if he visited army headquarters he would be hanged on the spot, and partly for this reason he was distrusted and feared by the Tsarina Alexandra, who had convinced herself that the grand duke coveted the imperial throne. Though Russia could have only one prime objective in 1915—to throw the Germans into terminal disarray—the question of how to accomplish this was anything but settled. Powerful members of the general staff wanted to strike directly at central Germany. Another faction wanted to complete the penetration of the Carpathians and finish off Austria-Hungary as a prelude to Germany’s destruction. The grand duke, lacking clear guidance or firm support from Tsar Nicholas, was not well positioned to resolve such questions and lacked firm convictions. His inclination was to try to satisfy everyone.

Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg
Germany’s national idol—but increasingly a mere figurehead as the war continued.

A new reality facing all the combatants was Turkey’s entry into the war—a strange and unnecessary development. Backward and corrupt, economically and militarily feeble, the Ottoman Empire of 1914 was in no position to compete effectively with the great powers of Europe or even to function as a true partner of any of them. And it had much to lose by going to war with any of them. But to the Young Turks who had seized control in Constantinople in 1908 and clung to power in spite of their country’s losses in the Balkan wars, Europe’s August crisis had the appearance of a heaven-sent opportunity. Suddenly the Europeans coveted the Turks as potential allies. This change was as surprising as it was abrupt.