A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (56 page)

The decision to take command was characteristic of the tsar: it was courageous, even selfless, and deeply foolish. It was the last and by far the worst in a series of command changes that Nicholas made that summer. Late in June the tsar at last faced up to the incompetence of War Minister Sukhomlinov, who had rendered himself indefensible with his cavalier disregard of the most urgent problems. (When the army’s chief of artillery came begging for shells, claiming that without them Russia would have to make peace, Sukhomlinov told him to “go to the devil and shut up.”) The war ministry was given to Alexei Polivanov, an able and energetic general who immediately undertook a program of reforms. He made radical improvements in the supply system; created committees to take responsibility for munitions, food, fuel, transport, and refugees; and showed himself willing to work constructively with the Duma, the national assembly. Other such appointments had been similarly productive and were welcomed by almost everyone except Tsarina Alexandra, who believed that the only answer to Russia’s problems was for Nicholas to become more the autocrat, less willing to tolerate reformers and liberals. “You are about to write a glorious page in the history of your reign and Russia,” she wrote to her husband after persuading him to ignore the many ministers who had begged him not to become commander in chief. In her warped view, those ministers had questioned not just the wisdom of the tsar’s decision but his authority as autocrat. All of them were, she decided, enemies of the crown; all should be dismissed.

It was not hard to win Alexandra’s enmity, and she had a long memory. She had never forgiven Grand Duke Nicholas for refusing, during the failed revolution of 1905, to accept the leadership of a military dictatorship. In the wake of this refusal, the tsar had been left with no choice but to agree to a constitution and the creation of a national assembly. Both concessions compromised the autocracy. By making them necessary, the grand duke had shown himself too to be an enemy of the crown. Or so Alexandra thought. The possibility that the grand duke’s refusal and the tsar’s acquiescence had saved the regime is unlikely to have occurred to her.

Tsar Nicholas understood that from now on, as commander in chief, he would be blamed directly and personally for whatever happened to the army. “Perhaps a scapegoat is needed to save Russia,” he said in explaining himself to French Ambassador Paléologue. “I mean to be the victim. May the will of God be done.” Nicholas does not appear to have understood that, by keeping him far from the capital, his new responsibilities would encourage the increasingly widespread (and not mistaken) belief that the government was under the control of the tsarina and her beloved Rasputin. In any case, the British and French welcomed the change of command as evidence of Nicholas’s commitment to the war. They were pleased by the tsar’s choice of General Mikhail Alexeyev, a seasoned commander and a strategist of proven competence, as his chief of staff. The Germans too welcomed the change. They had learned to respect—though it is not always easy to understand why—Grand Duke Nicholas’s abilities.

As before, success in the east was not giving the Germans as much comfort as might have been expected. By early September, having abandoned the cities of Brest-Litovsk and Bialystok, the Russians had withdrawn to a remote, treacherous, and largely uncharted region called the Pripet Marshes. Falkenhayn, refusing to follow them into such a morass, ordered all the commanders in the east to cease offensive operations. He began making arrangements to transfer several army corps back to the west and, at the same time, to get Bulgaria into the war by helping it to conquer Serbia. His instructions were disregarded by Conrad and Ludendorff alike; both would later claim to have misunderstood.

On August 31, apparently swept up in one of his periodic fantasies about duplicating the triumphs of the Germans, Conrad had launched his tattered forces on a sweeping offensive aimed at encircling twenty-five Russian divisions and, after defeating them, driving eastward into Ukraine. This effort started out well enough but ended badly. One of the Austrian armies, after capturing the city of Lutsk, was taken in the flank by a Russian force that had concealed itself in marshland grasses. Disaster followed upon disaster. Ultimately Falkenhayn had to detach two of the divisions preparing to invade Serbia and send them to the rescue. Conrad lost three hundred thousand men in September. Ludendorff meanwhile, continuing his Courland campaign, had taken the Lithuanian capital of Vilna. In doing so he provoked a panic in Petrograd, which though hundreds of miles from the Courland front became the scene of hasty preparations for flight. The capture of Vilna had come at such a cost, however—fifty thousand German casualties—that Ludendorff soon abandoned his hopes of taking the Russian city of Riga. He settled down to a busy winter of organizing and administering his conquests.

Max Hoffmann, unquestionably one of the most brilliant generals on either side, was by now also one of the most frustrated. He continued to blame Falkenhayn for failing to pursue a decision in the east, but now he blamed Ludendorff too, for attacking too directly at Vilna and thereby making that victory such a painful one. As for Hindenburg, Hoffmann regarded him as so passive, so utterly a figurehead, as to be little short of contemptible. “On the whole Hindenburg no longer bothers himself with military matters,” Hoffmann wrote at this time. “He hunts a good deal and otherwise comes for five minutes in the morning and evening to see how things are going. He no longer has the slightest interest in military matters.” Another general on Ludendorff’s staff confided at about this time that “Hindenburg himself is becoming increasingly a mere stooge.” The aged hero spent many hours having numerous portraits of himself painted and writing to his wife.

As for Ludendorff and Falkenhayn, all the successes of 1915 had done nothing to cool their mutual hatred. When they met at Kovno late in the year to join in the kaiser’s ceremonial celebration of their conquests, Falkenhayn used the occasion to throw down the gauntlet.

“Now are you convinced,” he demanded of Ludendorff, “that my operation was correct?”

“On the contrary!” Ludendorff replied. Russia had not surrendered. Russia had not sued for peace. How could anyone be satisfied? Falkenhayn was heard to say that when the war ended it was going to be necessary to court-martial Ludendorff.

The next bloodstorm broke in the west on September 25 with the opening of Joffre’s fall offensive. And a very great storm it was: three distinct offensives in three places. In the Second Battle of Champagne, west of Verdun where the front ran east-west, twenty-seven French divisions backed by nine hundred heavy and sixteen hundred light guns that Joffre had stripped from his border fortresses attacked seven German divisions stretched thin across thirty-six miles of front. The Third Battle of Artois saw seventeen divisions commanded by Ferdinand Foch set out against a north-south line defended by only two German divisions. A little farther north, at Loos, the British had a comparably overwhelming advantage: six British divisions against one German. It was the spring offensive repeated on an even larger scale. The objective was to cut off the Noyon salient, break the rail line that connected the two ends of the German front, and force a general withdrawal.

Even in the spring, however, the Germans had demonstrated prodigious defensive capabilities in the face of superior numbers, and throughout the summer they had been installing new lines far to the rear beyond the reach of enemy artillery and connecting them with perpendicular trenches and tunnels. They were well equipped with heavy artillery and adept at its use, and they were learning to place their machine guns so as to neutralize any attackers who survived their artillery. All this helps to explain the lack of optimism on the British side. Kitchener, in insisting on full British participation despite not believing it could succeed, may have been motivated in part by talk of putting all Entente forces under a single commander, and by fear that a refusal to cooperate might cost him the appointment. Sir John French, though usually eager to attack, warned that in this case he had less than a third of the divisions needed for success, and that the ground over which his men were asked to advance was dangerously devoid of cover. But he too had political reasons for not complaining too vehemently: he believed that only the support of Joffre and Foch was preventing his own government from removing him from command, and that his future depended on keeping that support. General Sir Henry Rawlinson, commander of the corps that would lead the British attack, predicted before starting out that “it will cost us dearly, and we will not get very far.” French General Pétain, who would be in direct charge of the Champagne offensive, was similarly skeptical.

The only optimist, oddly, was Haig, who in the beginning had been opposed to Joffre’s scheme. His early gloom had been rooted in the fact that the BEF would have only 117 heavy guns to prepare its advance on a five-mile-wide front—fewer than half the number of guns per mile that Joffre was putting in place in Champagne—and in the same lack of protective cover that troubled French. His spirits had begun to lift when it was decided to precede the attack with a release of chlorine. He was so encouraged by this idea that he had a tower constructed from which to observe his troops as they rolled over the German defenses.

Haig’s high spirits were briefly dampened when King George V visited BEF headquarters and borrowed one of the general’s horses for a review of the troops. A corporal in the Sherwood Foresters regiment left a record of what happened when the men lined up to be inspected: “The King rode along the first three or four ranks, then crossed the road to the other three or four ranks on the other side, speaking to an officer here and there. Our instructions had been that at the conclusion of the parade we were to put our caps on the points of our fixed bayonets and wave and cheer. So that’s what we did—‘Hip, hip, hooray.’ Well, the King’s horse reared and he fell off. He just seemed to slide off and so of course the second ‘Hip, hip’ fizzled out. It was quite a fiasco and you should have seen the confusion as these other high-ranking officers rushed to dismount and go to the King’s assistance. They got him up and the last we saw of him he was being hurriedly driven away.”

The attack was preceded in the French sectors by four days and nights of shelling. This had the advantage of obliterating the German first line and many of the men in it, the disadvantage of making it obvious to the Germans that something big was coming. When the morning of the attack arrived, operations began smoothly everywhere except in the British sector, where uncertain winds made it difficult for Haig to decide whether to allow the release of the gas. His men meanwhile were huddled in the frontline trenches—“some chaps were crying, some praying,” one of them would recall—and being given all the rum they could drink while waiting for the order to advance. At five-fifteen
A.M.,
when the wind seemed favorable at last, Haig gave his approval and climbed his tower. Soon afterward, however, the wind shifted. The gas began drifting back into the faces of the British troops. When it had dissipated, the Tommies who had not been disabled began to advance. Like the French to their north and east, they were soon making rapid progress.

And then, in place after place and in an absurdly wide variety of ways, everything started to go wrong. In Champagne the French ran through the wreckage of the first German line and reached the second much sooner than anyone had expected—so much sooner that they entered the trenches just as a French artillery barrage timed to prepare the way for them came down on their heads. The survivors of this terrifying stroke of bad luck had to retreat to escape being destroyed. By the time a resumption of the attack became possible, the opportunity was gone. German reserves had come forward and, being rich in machine guns, quickly took possession of what the French had had to give up. Among these reserves were two of the corps that Falkenhayn had recently rushed to the west. Falkenhayn himself was on the scene—such was his worry about the Germans’ lack of manpower—and took a hand in keeping the defenses intact. Early on, when the French were moving forward strongly, he arrived at the headquarters of the German Third Army only to discover that its chief of staff was preparing to order a retreat. Falkenhayn relieved the man on the spot and ordered that the army hold its ground at all costs while waiting for the reinforcements that he knew would soon arrive.

At Artois too, after making excellent progress and for the second time that year briefly occupying the crest of Vimy Ridge, the French were stopped by an intact German second line and ultimately driven back. Joffre, who from the start had regarded Champagne as the key to the offensive and Artois as relatively unimportant, at this point began to play what can only be regarded as an underhanded game. He wanted the British, whose attack at Loos was supposedly intended merely to support the bigger French force at Artois, to remain on the offensive. But he also now wanted to end the Artois attack, having concluded that it had no chance of accomplishing anything. Therefore he suspended operations at Artois while pretending, for the benefit of the British, that he was doing nothing of the kind. Even alone, however, the British did well at first. Like the French, they passed easily through the pulverized German first line. Unlike the French, they also broke through the second line, though with heavy losses. The ground ahead was clear, and if reserves had been available, the long-yearned-for push into open country might have been possible. French, however, had positioned the BEF’s general reserves as many as ten miles to the rear, and Haig had departed from sound military practice by failing to hold part of his own army back in reserve. Getting the general reserve to the front line ended up taking many hours; by the time it arrived, the Germans had filled the hole and were hammering away with their machine guns. When the British tried to resume their advance, the result was the most one-sided slaughter of the war: 7,861 troops and 385 officers were killed or wounded in a few hours, while German casualties totaled exactly zero. As the British finally began to withdraw, the Germans stopped firing and let them go. The machine-gunners were “nauseated by the sight,” a German history of the fight would state, “of the massacre of the field of corpses.”