A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (71 page)

As his illness worsened, the old man refused to rest. He would put his head down on his desk and let his pen fall to the floor but then recover himself and return to his papers or his next official visitor. When he was put to bed for the last time, he had to be carried there against his will. “I still have work to do,” he complained. “Wake me tomorrow at half past three.” That night he was given the last rites, lost consciousness, and quietly died.

His was one of the good deaths of 1916; it is impossible not to feel grateful that Franz Joseph did not live to see what the rest of the war would bring. Something similar can be said of the passing of Kitchener in June. He too was getting on, and by the time of his drowning he was clearly a failure as minister of war. His autocratic ways had been totally unsuited to cabinet government, and only his stature as a public hero kept him in his job. He had been free to accept the tsar’s invitation to visit Russia because nobody really wanted him in London. The sinking of his ship gave him a kind of warrior’s death that he might have welcomed. His future, like the Austrian emperor’s, would likely have been laden with disappointment.

December 29 would bring a different kind of death. Late that night the monk Rasputin made a visit to the palace of Prince Felix Youssopov, husband of the tsar’s niece Irina and heir to a fortune bigger than that of the Romanovs. This young nobleman was a degenerate who had spent his life in the pursuit of every kind of sensual excess. As early as 1915 he had become obsessively committed to the notion that Rasputin was a threat to the survival of the regime of which he and his family were such spectacularly conspicuous beneficiaries. Rasputin, he decided, must die. Slowly, hesitantly, he assembled a little circle of conspirators, among whom was the young Grand Duke Dmitri Romanov, cousin to the tsar.

It is alleged, though some say otherwise, that what drew Rasputin to the palace that night was Youssopov’s hint that the beautiful Irina would be made available to him there. This might explain why the customarily foul monk arrived in a new silk blouse, his boots polished and his person heavily perfumed. It is also said that after his arrival he was given wine and candies heavily laced with potassium cyanide, but other accounts say that whoever was responsible for providing the poison lost his nerve and used cooking powder instead. The poison story is particularly questionable: nothing Rasputin ate or drank that night appeared to have any effect beyond helping to keep him drunk. After a long period of music and dancing, with Rasputin not only failing to expire but suggesting a visit to Petrograd’s brothels, Youssopov directed his attention to a silver and crystal crucifix displayed in a nearby cabinet. When the monk went to look, Youssopov pulled out a revolver and shot him in the back. Rasputin fell to the floor, apparently dead.

Grigori Rasputin with some of his many female admirers

Youssopov’s accomplices, who had been waiting in concealment upstairs, joined him in nervous celebration. Sometime later Rasputin opened his eyes. Then he was on his feet, lunging at Youssopov. The prince broke free and ran up the stairs, Rasputin close behind. When Youssopov escaped through a door and locked it behind him, Rasputin left the palace. He was on his way to the gate when one of Youssopov’s accomplices began firing at him with a pistol. The first two shots missed, but the third brought Rasputin down. The gunman drew nearer and fired yet again, believing that this time he had shot his prey in the head. Youssopov came running out of the palace with a club in his hand. After several hard blows Rasputin sank into the snow, again apparently dead. His body was wrapped in a curtain, bound with rope, and dumped into the icy waters of the canal outside the gate. Later, when the corpse was fished out of the ice, police investigators found that before dying Rasputin had worked free of his bindings. An autopsy determined that the cause of his death was drowning. He had still been alive when thrown into the water and was not yet out of fight.

The mystery of Rasputin is impenetrable. That he was a singularly low character is beyond question, but if he did not also have strange powers he was singularly successful at seeming to do so. Among his effects was a letter written days before his death. It was addressed to “the Russian people, to Papa [his name for the tsar], to the Russian Mother and to the Children, to the land of Russia.” In it he predicted that he would not live to see the new year, which was only days away when he wrote, and offered a warning. “Tsar of the land of Russia,” he wrote, “if you hear the sound of the bell which will tell you that Grigori has been killed, you must know this: if it was your relations who have wrought my death then no one of your family, that is to say none of your children or relations, will remain alive for more than two years. They will all be killed by the Russian people.”

The news of Rasputin’s murder caused public jubilation. Youssopov and his accomplices, though they denied involvement, were acclaimed as heroes. Rasputin was buried in Romanov parkland, his funeral secret and attended by scarcely a handful of people. Among that handful, however, were the tsar and tsarina and their children. Whether anything would have turned out differently if Rasputin had died a year or two earlier, there is no way of knowing. By the time it came, his death was too late to change anything.

At almost exactly the same time, at the end of an almost indescribably complex struggle that split Britain’s major parties into a jumble of disconnected fragments, Herbert Henry Asquith was displaced as prime minister. What broke Asquith in the end was not any failure on his part (through more than two years of war he had been a skillful if cautious leader, first of the Liberal government, then of the coalition that replaced it) but the demands of David Lloyd George for an ever-larger role in the management of the war. Finally those demands grew to a point where Asquith felt he could not accede to them without becoming a mere figurehead. A showdown was inevitable, and it came at a time when Asquith, absorbing the shock of his son’s death in the Battle of the Somme, was unable to keep himself focused. (“Whatever pride I had in the past and whatever hope I had for the future—by far the largest part was invested in him,” Asquith wrote after learning of this death. “Now all that is gone.”) When Asquith misplayed his hand, Lloyd George unseated and replaced him.

The new prime minister had had the kind of career that causes people on the western side of the Atlantic to say “Only in America!” Born into exceedingly humble circumstances, orphaned at an early age and raised in Wales by a shoemaker uncle, he began as a law clerk, struggled to gain admission to the bar, married a farmer’s daughter, and won election to Parliament at the age of twenty-seven. A firebrand reformer, a champion of progressive legislation and of industrial and agricultural workers, he rose fast in the Liberal party and by 1908, at forty-five, was chancellor of the exchequer. Along the way he built a record of opposing military spending and overseas adventures, favoring domestic programs instead. He paid a political price for doing so and learned to be careful not to alienate the Conservatives too much.

In July 1914 Lloyd George was a leading figure among the Liberal ministers resisting the slide into war. When the German invasion of Belgium radically changed public opinion, he quickly and adroitly moved with it. From then on he was not only a supporter of the war but a tireless agitator for total British commitment, controversial at times for his absolute rejection of any possible settlement short of victory. He more than anyone else was the force behind Britain’s conscription laws, and it was he who created and then took charge of the ministry of munitions in response to the shell crisis of 1915, giving up his post at the treasury to do so.

In the summer of 1916, when Kitchener drowned, Lloyd George bullied where necessary and maneuvered where possible to get himself named secretary of state for war. In that position he soon became more powerful and effective than Kitchener ever had been. His rise to prime minister at the end of the year ensured that, however long the war lasted, Britain would have strong and capable and unwaveringly determined political leadership. It also ensured that that leadership would often be bitterly at odds with the leading British generals—with Robertson, the chief of the imperial general staff, and with Haig at the BEF.

Chapter 24

Exhaustion

“It is not surprising if the effect on some intelligent men was a bitter conviction that they were being uselessly sacrificed.”

—O
FFICIAL
A
USTRALIAN HISTORY OF THE
B
ATTLE OF THE
S
OMME

T
hroughout the second half of 1916, great irruptions of violence followed one after another as the forces set in motion earlier in the year overflowed into places previously untouched and finally played themselves out in failure and despair. The Battle of the Somme, after its terrible first day, contracted immediately though not permanently into a more limited conflict. On July 2 Haig, aware by now of the extent of his losses, sent only three divisions into attacks—barely more than a fifth of the number that had gone into action the preceding day. Not one of those divisions, strangely, was sent to exploit Congreve’s breakthrough at Montauban, and Congreve himself was again not allowed to move. Along much of the front, action was limited to gruesome nighttime forays into no-man’s-land for the purpose of finding those still alive among the heaps of corpses. At Beaumont-Hamel, where the number of dead and wounded was unmanageably large, German soldiers slipped out of their trenches after dark and, without a word being exchanged, helped the British rescue parties with the work of retrieval.

Also on July 2, at Baranovitchi in the northern reaches of the Eastern Front, Russian General Evert at last launched the offensive that he had promised weeks earlier in support of Brusilov. Evert had a thousand guns, each of which fired a thousand rounds in advance of the assault, and he had more than twenty-six divisions to send against two Austrian divisions backed by six German divisions in reserve. The result was a disaster almost equal to Lake Naroch in its magnitude. Though one of the Austrian divisions collapsed, the other held its ground, and when the Germans came forward, they inflicted eighty thousand casualties on the attackers, losing only sixteen thousand men themselves. This ended any possibility of further Russian initiatives in the north.

For the first time the Brusilov offensive was given first priority by the tsar’s headquarters. All available troops found themselves headed toward his theater of operations. Brusilov resumed his campaign even before the Baranovitchi fight was over, and in short order he was again producing stunning victories. In four days he took forty thousand prisoners and captured three hundred and thirty guns. He began moving his armies, which now outnumbered those facing him by two to one, northward toward the Austro-Hungarian stronghold at Kovel.

On July 10, in a final lunge at glory, Knobelsdorf sent off a cobbled-together force roughly equivalent to three divisions in another attempt to take Verdun. A handful of these troops reached Fort Souville and stood briefly atop its protective shell waving flags. But Knobelsdorf had no reserves with which to follow up, and they were soon blown away by French artillery. The attack was suspended with a speed that was merciful to the troops on both sides. It was the Germans’ last spasm at Verdun, though by no means the end of the killing. It was also the end of Knobelsdorf’s part in the drama; on the orders of the kaiser, who had been driven by mounting disappointment to begin listening to his son, he was sent off to command a corps on the Eastern Front. Falkenhayn, harried by the crises on the Somme and in the southeast, increased the number of troops being transferred to both places.

At the Somme, meanwhile, the British continued to pound away with their artillery at the German defenses. One German soldier, after being taken prisoner, described for an English journalist the experience of having to take turns huddling in overcrowded bunkers under a barrage so intense that supplies could not get through. “Those who went outside were killed or wounded,” he said. “Some of them had their heads blown off, and some of them had both their legs torn off, and some of them their arms. But we went on taking turns in the hole, although those who went outside knew that it was their turn to die, most likely. At last some of those who came into the hole were wounded, some of them badly, so that we lay in blood.”