Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (71 page)

The horrors that befell the Jewish people in the Second World War are well known to posterity. There is much less recognition of Jewish sufferings in 1914, mostly at the hands of Russians. Hundreds of Jews perished in Galicia, and many more lost everything they possessed. A pathological suspicion developed among Russians of merchants in general, and Jews in particular. John Reed described Poland’s Jews as ‘bowed, thin men in rusty derbies and greasy long coats, with stringy beards and crafty desperate eyes, cringing from police, soldiers and priests and staring at the peasants – a hunted people, made hateful by extortion and abuse’.

In October, residents of a Warsaw apartment block reported that a conspiracy was being hatched by Jews gathering in the building, who planned to ‘dismember’ them. Police who were called found that, instead, the hapless ‘conspirators’ were discussing possible routes to pass through the front to the relative safety of German territory. Alfred Knox wrote on 14 October: ‘It is said that a Jew was caught carrying a German officer in a sack across the bridge at Ivangorod. Both were hung.’ During a pogrom in captured Lemberg in November, twenty Jews were killed by Cossacks. In December, sixty-four Warsaw Jews were arrested and detained as alleged members of a conspiracy to raise prices through speculation: all their goods were confiscated.

Progressively worse things befell Eastern Europe’s Jews for the rest of the war, and a host of other innocents suffered equally grievously. In Hapsburg territory, minorities roused chronic suspicion. In the fortress city of Przemyśl an Austrian army edict worthy of the Third Reich was issued, proclaiming that ‘only extreme ruthlessness and harshness will … choke off potential dissident activity among the inhabitants’. Ruthenes were widely believed to be Russian sympathisers. On 16 September, a group of forty-five detained by military police were being led through the
streets of the city when they were attacked by a mob shouting ‘Hang the traitors!’ Some Hungarian Landwehr troops, hearing the clamour, seized the detainees in Bocianstrasse and hacked all but four to death with their sabres.

The Russians’ initial withdrawal made Conrad over-confident. As he pushed forward in their wake into Polish territory, his advance outran its supply lines, and familiar Hapsburg chaos set in. Columns of horse artillery forged ahead of the infantry. Order and counter-order caused some units to march in circles. In dramatic contrast to the almost continuous fronts in France, amid the vast empty spaces of the East units became lost, sometimes for days; the whereabouts of the enemy became matter for speculation. Nightfall often came without rations reaching weary troops. Staff officer Theodor Ritter Zeynek deplored
kinderkrankheiten
– ‘teething troubles’ – in the cavalry which cost heavy losses: foolish horsemen disported themselves in the face of the enemy with the sort of carelessness their grandfathers had shown in the mid-nineteenth century. Few aircraft were available to either side, and lack of reconnaissance caused another series of chance clashes between 28 and 30 August, which cost Ivanov’s armies the loss of a hundred guns and 20,000 men captured.

One of these was Ivan Kuznetsov. He and his comrades, not to mention their officers, had become utterly bewildered by the manner in which they were marched and counter-marched across the frontier zone. At the end of August, they retreated to a place where they found a large contingent of conscripted civilians digging trenches. The troops occupied these through the hours of darkness, then at dawn were ordered to abandon them and fall back. Yet as they approached a village, a colonel galloped up and shouted that they must return to the trenches.

Chaos descended: ‘soldiers from all the companies and platoons got mixed up. Officers were shouting for their own men.’ They straggled back to the trenches, a rabble rather than an ordered regiment, just in time to be outflanked by an Austrian advance. Hundreds of Russian soldiers milled, yelled, fired rifles wildly as they searched for their companies, mostly in vain. A shell exploded beside Kuznetsov, hurling him into the air and stunning him into unconsciousness. He awoke to find that silence had descended – and that he was a prisoner. His captors addressed him in Polish: ‘
Dobje pane bude, dobje!
’ Kuznetsov wrote: ‘I didn’t understand then, but later I learned, that this meant “You will
be fine, mister, you will be fine!”’ Hundreds of his compatriots, however, were not. As Kuznetsov was assisted onto a cart to be taken to the rear, he saw dead and wounded men lying everywhere.

In the Austrian lines Conrad crowed, claiming a great victory. But the Russians were bringing forward reinforcements, and their supply line was now shorter than that of the Austrians. Even as Conrad’s northern armies launched their advance into Russian Poland, south of Lemberg between the 26th and 28th they also attacked the much larger Russian army on the river Złota Lipa; this time, it was the Austrians’ turn to suffer a defeat as costly as that which Ivanov’s army had incurred further north. Near Chochłów, at a divisional staff meeting a comrade of Constantin Schneider pointed to a cloud overhead. The officer suggested fancifully that its shape resembled a back view of Bismarck’s head. ‘It was as if he, the creator of the Triple Alliance who had always opposed war with Russia, was now turning his back on us.’ On the 29th and 30th, in the south the Austrians attacked again – and were badly beaten. Franz Joseph’s regiments advanced in masses with little artillery support, and were rewarded with crippling losses.

Yet Conrad the fantasist persuaded himself that apparent success in the north made defeat in the south unimportant. He conceived a complex plan to allow the Russians in the southern sector to advance further, then swing his northern armies to attack their flank. He became especially excited by news of Tannenberg, which reached him at this time: anything Germans could do, Austrians must match. Through the first week of September, both sides’ forces blundered across Galicia, their men exhausted by interminable marching even before they began to fight. Ruzsky occupied the abandoned Austrian fortress of Lemberg on the 3rd, but then during the days that followed was worsted in several brushes with the enemy.

Conrad’s most serious folly was to ignore the fact that the Russians were heavily reinforcing in the north, while he prepared his intended Napoleonic masterstroke in the south. By 1 September, some thirty-five Russian divisions faced twenty Austrian ones. These bore down upon Conrad’s positions south of Lublin with irresistible force, and even found sufficient spare troops to make a lunge towards a corps of German reservists deployed east of the Vistula, screening the Kaiser’s territories. This force fell back in disarray across the river, having lost 8,000 men – it deserves notice that the Russians, in the first two years of the war, captured more German prisoners than the British and French armies put together.
Though the humiliation of defeat at Tannenberg, and soon also at the Masurian Lakes, lay heavy upon the Russian army, in Poland in September its fortunes suddenly soared.

A few miles behind the front, the city of Lublin was in a fever of excitement. Crowds clustered outside the cathedral to examine artillery pieces captured from the Austrians, their shields – one inscribed
Ultima Ratio Regis
, the other
Pro Gloria Patriae
– pockmarked with bullet-holes. A young Russian gunner proudly showed off to ignorant civilians how they worked, giving himself imaginary orders, loading make-believe shells, pulling the trigger lanyard and shouting ‘Fire!’ Clouds of dust raised by thousands of tramping boots swirled above the streets. At the railway station soldiers lay curled in huddles, sleeping with their rifles beside them and their caps tipped over their eyes. ‘Even at two or three in the morning,’ wrote an eyewitness, ‘the city is unable to quiet itself, streets thronged with people excited and anxious after the victory.’ He watched a crowd of Austrian prisoners being escorted through the streets, most gazing fixedly at their feet rather than at their surroundings, unwilling to meet the eyes of local people.

Overwhelming Russian pressure on the enemy’s flanks began to tell: in action after action, Conrad’s exhausted formations were worsted and obliged to fall back. The mood in the Austrian camp was profoundly gloomy: a soldier, Pàl Kelemen, watched from nearby Halicz as fugitives fled the fortress of Lemberg:

The population was pouring out of the city in long columns. On carts, on foot, horseback. Everyone making shift to save himself. All of them carrying away what they can, and exhaustion, dust, sweat, panic on every face, terrible dejection, pain and suffering. Their eyes are frightened, their movements craven: ghastly terror oppresses them. As if the dust cloud they stirred up had bound itself to them and could waft them away. I lie sleepless by the roadside and watch the infernal kaleidoscope. There are even military wagons muddled into it, while across the fields march routed infantry, lost cavalry. Not a man of them still carries his full equipment. The exhausted throng pours through the valley. They are running back to Stanislau.

The fall of Lemberg, fourth largest city in the Hapsburg Empire, represented a serious humiliation, and Austrian troubles persisted through the days that followed: many guns were lost, including some simply
abandoned by crews to speed their own flight. On the night of the 8th, Conrad’s officers, contemplating their filthy, exhausted and dispirited men, recognised that the army was beaten. Next day, Russian forces advanced on them from north, east and west. The Austrians’ only avenue of escape lay southwards, and they took it. ‘With a stab of awareness, a painful sense of failure, our column crossed the border once more, its dreams of victory shattered,’ wrote Constantin Schneider.

Desperate days followed. Rüdiger Freiherr Stillfried von Rathenitz was an eighteen-year-old platoon commander in a
Feldjäger
battalion, ordered to launch a counter-attack near Magierów at dawn on 10 September. His men lost patience with lying at a forest edge under fierce Russian artillery fire, waiting for the order to advance. Somebody shouted ‘
Vorwärts!
’ – ‘Come on!’ The Austrians sprang to their feet and ran forward across open ground under the barrage, Rathenitz following them and struggling in vain to curb their exuberance: ‘I wanted to check this mad dash, but my shouting went unheeded – no orders could be given.’ Absurdly, as the men ran, some held their spades protectively in front of their faces. Then they took cover again, and began to dig in. Rathenitz himself had barely started scraping when he felt a slap in his right foot, followed by a fierce pain in the upper leg. He knew he had been hit.

He was obliged to lie in the open for the next fifteen hours, until darkness fell, because no stretcher-bearer would brave the fire sweeping the area. He was solaced by the company of a soldier who helped him to dig in: ‘At midday it got unbearably hot; we were dreadfully tormented by thirst.’ His comrade found a piece of stale bread which they shared, before rolling a cigarette from toilet paper and pipe tobacco. At 9.30 that evening, at last they were carried to the rear. After a ghastly journey on a cart, among a column of such vehicles whose passengers sustained ‘ceaseless moans and groaning’, he reached Przemyśl. From there he was taken by train to Vienna, where he remained hospitalised for weeks.

On 11 September Conrad ordered a general retreat. Constantin Schneider was sent to ride through the dark night to beg help from the neighbouring division to plug a dangerous gap in the line. On his way, he met a shattered battalion that had lost 90 per cent of its strength, whose commander was grateful to be told where he was. When Schneider delivered his appeal for succour, the divisional commander dismissed it at once, shrugging that he was himself too short of men to spare any reinforcements. The staff officer’s long ride had been in vain. Schneider returned to his own headquarters oppressed by the peril facing the army.
The Tsar’s generals continued to pour in reinforcements, while Conrad’s numbers shrank and his men wilted under the strain of constant marching. By 9 September the Russians were pushing forward relentlessly, threatening the Austrians with absolute disaster. Conrad appealed to the Germans for assistance. The Kaiser, with his forces in the midst of their crisis retreat from the Marne, responded that nothing could immediately be done.

The Russians’ successes owed much more to Austrian blundering than to their own generalship or prowess, but Conrad’s humiliation was incontestable. This seemed the less palatable in contrast to German triumphs elsewhere. Alexander Pallavicini described the sour response to news of Tannenberg among his comrades of the army staff. They grumbled: ‘Always the Prussians and not us.’ Pallavicini responded that ‘this should not matter, so long as the victories are there’. The others still dissented, but he stuck to his guns, venturing boldly: ‘It would be better to put everything under German command.’ This was not well received. ‘I do not make myself popular by saying such things.’ He added two days later: ‘The Germans’ success seems ever greater. They must have a secret formula –
die müssen ein geheimes Kraut haben
. In our circumstances this is hard to take, but one should not forget that we face the bulk and cream of the Russian army.’ The Tsar’s subjects in Galicia’s frontier areas rejoiced as the invaders were driven back. Stanislav Kunitsky, a landowner, had sent his children away to Lublin when the Austrians overran his estate, then spent thirty-six hours hiding in the cellar of his mansion with his wife while battle raged around them. Once liberated – for a time – by Cossacks, he invited their officers to a feast dominated by ‘a fabulous cabbage soup’ and a giant carp from his pond. While the Kunitsky garden remained scarred with shell craters, the table was adorned with autumn asters.

Millions of peasant soldiers’ ignorance of technology yielded moments of comedy. A Russian explained to a correspondent how he won a medal: ‘Well sir, I was on the road and saw an automobile coming towards me … driven by a man in a German hat. I stepped aside and started shooting. I hit the vehicle and it stopped. I ran forward and shot the fellow who was in it. I thought then of taking it to headquarters. I got into the driver’s seat and tried to make it move, but I couldn’t. The vehicle was puffing, but it wouldn’t go. Then I saw a peasant with a cart. I made him unharness it, and [use his horse to] pull away the automobile.’ Soldiers gaped at the first primitive Russian armoured cars, deployed in action near Łódź. One man contemplating a steel-plated monster observed gravely: ‘a serious thing’. A
correspondent wrote of the cars: ‘They are welcome guests, everywhere invited to make a long stay.’