The new face of war: a German Uhlan, or lancer, could seem a figure of ancient legend except for the mask that protects him from poison gas.
ELSEWEHRE THE SEARCH
1915 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 5 months of 1914 more than 800,000 Germans had become casualties, and more than a 100,000 of them were dead. French and Austro-Hungarian casualties, were in the million-man range, Russia's total approached twice that, hundred of thousands of Frenchman were listed as dead or missing, and more than half of the Tommies who had come over in August were dead or injured. In very country the shock was numbing. A monument in a single Parisian church, Notre -Dame des Victoires, displays the names of 80 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 domination fact was German occupation of a huge expanse of the French homeland: regions that included 14% of the nation's industrial workforce, 2/3 of its steel production, 90% of its iron mines, and 40% 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 1/3 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-Germany 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 1st 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 60,000 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 100,000 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 streamroller 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 difference 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 of 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 had 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 Hoffman were the brains of the team-saw opportunities to crush the Russians. Whether out of strategic conviction of jealously 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 Lundendorff 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. Tanneberg 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 Lundendorff, he undercut Falkenhayn at every opportunity, spoke openly of Falkenhayn's unfitness for the positions he occupied, and encourage 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 6ft 6 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 from convictions. His inclination was to try to satisfy everyone.
Sunday, July 10, 2016
Friday, January 8, 2016
FLANDER FIEDLDS 2
Denied the manpower their original plan required, Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and Hoffmann didn't give up. They moved their 9th army, the one that had had such a narrow escape from the Russians near Warsaw, back into East Prussia by train. There they combined it with the 8th army to form a mass of troops extending across 70 miles. They then waited as the Russians moved across Poland toward the west. When, as expected, the advance began to show signs of bogging down under its own tremendous weight and the difficulties of resupply, they sent their two armies down on it like a hammer. At the main point of contact the Germans actually had a numerical advantage, and the Russians were staggered. After 4 hours days of hard they began to retreat. The Germans pursued, hitting at the Russians repeatedly.
Falkenhayn was attacking again in Flanders, this time using more experienced troops and limiting himself to a narrower front. What he got wasn't victory but another series of inconclusive
battles all along the ridge outside Ypres, which was slowly being destroyed as the Germans shelled the ancient towers being used by the defenders as observation posts. Large and small groups of soldiers dashed from village to woodland, from canal to hedgerow, settling into firefights, advancing with bayonets, being thrown back and counterattacking while artillery from both sides rained shrapnel and high explosives down every target their spotters could find. The nature of the struggle is captured in the official account of First Ypres later prepared for the German general staff:
The enemy turned every house, every wood and every wall into a strong point, and each of them had to be stormed by our men with heavy loss. even when the first line of these fortifications had been taken they were confronted by a second one immediately behind it; for the enemy showed great skill in taking every advantage of the ground, unfavorable in any case to the attacker. To the east and south-east of Ypres, even more developed than in the north, there were thick hedges, wire fences and broad dikes. Numerous woods also of all sizes with dense undergrowth made the country almost impassable and most difficult for observation purposes. Our movements were constantly being limited to the roads which were swept by the enemy's machine-guns. Owing to the preparatory artillery bombardments the villages were mostly ruined by the time the infantry reached them, but the enemy fought desperately for every heap of stones and every pile of bricks before abandoning them. In the few villages streets that remained worthy of the name the fighting generally developed into isolated individual combats, and no description can do adequate justice to the bravery of the German troops on such occasions.
Nor, of course, it is possible to do justice to-perhaps even to understand-the bravery of the British and French troops who were defending those piles of stones and bricks. Even the barest chronology of how the villages near Ypres were taken and surrendered and taken again is enough to show why, in the end, hardly a stone was left standing upon a stone. Lambartzyde was captured by the Germans on October 23rd, retaken by the French a day later, recaptured by the Germans on October 28th taken yet again by the British and French on November 4th, recaptured by the Germans on November 7th, only to change hands twice more before finally and permanently ending up in the possession of the Germans.
Gradually, village by village, the Germans managed to inch forward and tighten their grip on the Ypres Salient, the semicircle held by the French and British east of the town. But time after time they failed to break through. On several occasions various French and British generals suggested that a retreat might be in order. Always it was Foch who refused. Before the war he had written that an army is never defeated until it believes itself to be defeated. Now, with considerable help from the Tommies, he appeared to be proving his point.
The German offensive crested on November 11th when the most elite unit in the entire German army, the 1st Guards Regiment led by the Kaiser's son Prince Eitel Friedrich, drove the British troops out of nonnebosschen. It was a repeat of Gheluvelt. Once again nothing separated the Germans from Ypres, and once again a ragtag assortment of the only British soldiers in the neighborhood(not combat troops at all but cooks, drivers, staff officers-anyone who could pick up a rifle) mounted a seemingly hopeless counterattack. Once again the Germans thought that the mysteriously absent Entente reserves must be moving into action at last and fled. That turned out to be the last time the Germans came close to breaking through.
The fighting went on until November 22nd, with more attacks, but increasingly it was an obviously futile struggle in rain and cold mud by half-crazed and hungry men desperate for rest. Even the old lion Kitchener was horrified. "This," he exclaimed "is not war!' Whatever it was, if finally came to an end when the rains turned to snow and the mud froze hard and the impossibility of achieving anything became to obvious to be ignored. Both sides claimed victory, the Enente because they had held on to Ypres and kept the Germans from reaching the Channel ports, the Germans not only because they had kept the enemy from breaking through not because by the end they had captured so many of the strong points around the destroyed town that the British and French no longer had an adequate base from which to launch new offensives.
By the time the Flanders front shut down for the winter, the British had taken 50,000 casualties there. More than half of the 160,000 men that Britain had by then sent to France were dead or wounded France's Ypres losses are believed to exceed 50,000, Germany's at least 100,000. Burke's Peerage, the registry of Britain's noble had to postpone publication of its latest edition to make the editorial changes required by the death in combat of 66 peers, 95 sons of peers, 16 baronets, 82 sons of baronets, and 6 knights.
The Russian retreat across Poland continued, with the Germans in pursuit. First the Russians tried to withdraw behind an expanse of wet lowland marshes, but the Germans drove them out. Then they tried to make a stand at the city of Lodz, but on December 6th they were again forced to move on. They had lost another 90,000 men at Lodz, the Germans 35,000. The Germans were 30 miles east of Lodz, and in possession of a 136,000 Russian prisoners, when their drive finally came to a stop. Winter made the stop necessary-the killing Russian winter. "Only about half had overcoats," an English war correspondent observed of German soldiers captured in a Russian counterattack. "and these were made of thin, shoddy material that is about as much protection as paper against the Russian wind. When you know that the prison camps are all in Siberia, try and think of the lot of prisoners. Yet for the moment the Germans were content. They were allowed to sleep. This is the boon that the man fresh from the trenches asks above all things. His days and nights have been one constant strain of alertness. His brain has been racked with the roar of cannon and his nerves frayed by the irregular bursting of shell. His mind is chaos... But when a soldier is once captured he feels that this responsibility of holding back the enemy is no longer his. He has failed. Well, he can sleep in peace now."
Both sides settled down to hacking makeshift defenses out of the frozen earth. The Germans had lost a 100,000 men in this last 1914 campaign while inflicting the astounding total of 530,000 casualties on the Russians. Their success, however, was of discouragingly limited value. As winter arrived, the Russians had 120 divisions on the front, and each division included 12 battalions. The Germans and Austrians together could muster only 60 divisions of 8 battalions each.
For Conrad and his armies, December was a month of high drama, of brief glory followed by final humiliation. As it opened, one of the Russian armies advancing against the Carpathians had taken possession of a mountain pass that gave it a gateway into Hungary. The commander of this Russian 8th army, a talented general named Alexei Brusilov, was in position to advance on Budapest and begin the conquest of the Hapsburg homeland. But at just this moment Conrad tried something that worked. He learned of a gap between Brusilov and the Russian army on its right, assembled an attack force, and on December 3rd drove it into the gap. The Russians were thrown off balance. In 4 days Conrad drove them back 40 miles. Though the masses of reinforcements sent forward out of the Russians reserve brought him to a halt by December 10th, the victory was an important one. It spoiled the Russians' hopes of crossing the Carpathians. It also rendered them incapable of executing a newly hatched plan to send a force from Krakow toward Germany. In combination with Hindenburg's and Ludendorff's November successes in Poland, it left the Russians bogged for the winter far from Berlin, Budapest, and Vienna.
Conrad poisoned his own hour of triumph by launching a year-end invasion of Serbia, his 3rd since the start of the war. The newest incursion started as promisingly as the others, with the Austrians quickly taking possession of much of the Serbian interior along with Belgrade. Just one day after the fall of Belgrade, however, in a moment of Balkan high drama, the mustachioed King Peter of Serbia, rifle in hand, announced to his soldiers that he was releasing them from their pledge to fight for him and the homeland but that he for one was going to the front, alone if necessary. This gesture rallied every doubting patriot to the cause. A counterattack organized by Serbian General Radomir Putnik-the same old soldier who had been caught vacationing in Austrian territory when the war began but was allowed to return home in an act of almost medieval courtesy by Emperor Franz Joseph-sent 200,000 Serb troops down on the overextended Austrians. The Austrians, who had gone days without food and were freezing in summer uniforms, fled back across the border. Again their losses were outlandish: 28,000 dead, a 120,000 wounded, 76,000 taken prisoner. The Serbs too had been badly hurt, with 22,000 wounded, 92,000 wounded, 9,000 captured or missing, and the survivors ravaged by dysentery and chlorea.
Never again, in the years of fighting that lay ahead, would the Austro-Hungarians be involved in a major offensive as anything more than adjuncts to the Germans. Never again would they win a major victory they could call their own. With the war scarcely begun, they were a spent force. With almost 4 years of war remaining, nearly 200,000 of Vienna's best troops-including ruinors numbers of its experienced officers and noncoms-were dead. Almost half a million had been wounded, and some 180,000 were prisoners of the Russians. There was fighting elsewhere as the year drew to a close. Even after the last assault at Ypres, the Western Front was never entirely quiet. Joffre kept ordering attacks wherever he thought the enemy wall might be weak. "Nibbling," he called it, but its cost in lives was high. By March it would add another 100,000 casualties to the French total.
People were becoming accustomed to the term world war. Since August there had been naval battles, some of them high in drama but none terribly important, all around the globe. There was bloodshed in Africa as the police and small military forces of the various European colonies jockeyed for advantage and the indigenous populations became involved, and in the Far East Japan helped itself to Germany's scattered holding.
The Middle East was being drawn in as well. The newest member of the Central Powers, Turkey, sent troops based in Syria into Persia. After so many years of watching the Europeans feast on its crumbling empire, the government in Constantinople was eager to recover some of its losses at last.
The British, in particular, were disturbed. When Russia suggested that a show of force near Istanbul might frighten the Turks and cause them to pull back from Persia, London found the idea attractive. A battleship was dispatched to the mouth of the Dardanelles, the narrow channel leading from the northeastern Mediterranean to Constantinople, the Black Sea, and Russia beyond. Upon arrival, the ship began shelling one of the outermost forts guarding the Dardanelles. Within half and hour the for was totally wrecked, incapable of defending itself or the sea route to Constantinople.
The battleship, never, threatened while it did its work, steamed serenely away. The whole thing had been so easy. First Lord of the Admiralty Churchill began to wonder: might the entire passage up to Constantinople be that easily taken.
In Flanders, where there had been so much horror, 1914 ended with a strange spontaneous eruption of fellow feeling. On Christmas morning, in their trenches began singing carols and displaying bits of evergreen decorated in observance of the occasion. The Tommies too began to sing.
Cautiously, unarmed Germans began showing themselves atop their defenses. Some of the British did the same. Step by Step this led to the gathering in no-man's-land of soldiers from both sides, to exchange of food and cigarettes, even games of soccer.
This was the Christmas Truce of 1914, and in places it continued for more than a day. The generals, indignant when they learned of the kind would happen again.
Denied the manpower their original plan required, Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and Hoffmann didn't give up. They moved their 9th army, the one that had had such a narrow escape from the Russians near Warsaw, back into East Prussia by train. There they combined it with the 8th army to form a mass of troops extending across 70 miles. They then waited as the Russians moved across Poland toward the west. When, as expected, the advance began to show signs of bogging down under its own tremendous weight and the difficulties of resupply, they sent their two armies down on it like a hammer. At the main point of contact the Germans actually had a numerical advantage, and the Russians were staggered. After 4 hours days of hard they began to retreat. The Germans pursued, hitting at the Russians repeatedly.
Falkenhayn was attacking again in Flanders, this time using more experienced troops and limiting himself to a narrower front. What he got wasn't victory but another series of inconclusive
battles all along the ridge outside Ypres, which was slowly being destroyed as the Germans shelled the ancient towers being used by the defenders as observation posts. Large and small groups of soldiers dashed from village to woodland, from canal to hedgerow, settling into firefights, advancing with bayonets, being thrown back and counterattacking while artillery from both sides rained shrapnel and high explosives down every target their spotters could find. The nature of the struggle is captured in the official account of First Ypres later prepared for the German general staff:
The enemy turned every house, every wood and every wall into a strong point, and each of them had to be stormed by our men with heavy loss. even when the first line of these fortifications had been taken they were confronted by a second one immediately behind it; for the enemy showed great skill in taking every advantage of the ground, unfavorable in any case to the attacker. To the east and south-east of Ypres, even more developed than in the north, there were thick hedges, wire fences and broad dikes. Numerous woods also of all sizes with dense undergrowth made the country almost impassable and most difficult for observation purposes. Our movements were constantly being limited to the roads which were swept by the enemy's machine-guns. Owing to the preparatory artillery bombardments the villages were mostly ruined by the time the infantry reached them, but the enemy fought desperately for every heap of stones and every pile of bricks before abandoning them. In the few villages streets that remained worthy of the name the fighting generally developed into isolated individual combats, and no description can do adequate justice to the bravery of the German troops on such occasions.
Nor, of course, it is possible to do justice to-perhaps even to understand-the bravery of the British and French troops who were defending those piles of stones and bricks. Even the barest chronology of how the villages near Ypres were taken and surrendered and taken again is enough to show why, in the end, hardly a stone was left standing upon a stone. Lambartzyde was captured by the Germans on October 23rd, retaken by the French a day later, recaptured by the Germans on October 28th taken yet again by the British and French on November 4th, recaptured by the Germans on November 7th, only to change hands twice more before finally and permanently ending up in the possession of the Germans.
Gradually, village by village, the Germans managed to inch forward and tighten their grip on the Ypres Salient, the semicircle held by the French and British east of the town. But time after time they failed to break through. On several occasions various French and British generals suggested that a retreat might be in order. Always it was Foch who refused. Before the war he had written that an army is never defeated until it believes itself to be defeated. Now, with considerable help from the Tommies, he appeared to be proving his point.
The German offensive crested on November 11th when the most elite unit in the entire German army, the 1st Guards Regiment led by the Kaiser's son Prince Eitel Friedrich, drove the British troops out of nonnebosschen. It was a repeat of Gheluvelt. Once again nothing separated the Germans from Ypres, and once again a ragtag assortment of the only British soldiers in the neighborhood(not combat troops at all but cooks, drivers, staff officers-anyone who could pick up a rifle) mounted a seemingly hopeless counterattack. Once again the Germans thought that the mysteriously absent Entente reserves must be moving into action at last and fled. That turned out to be the last time the Germans came close to breaking through.
The fighting went on until November 22nd, with more attacks, but increasingly it was an obviously futile struggle in rain and cold mud by half-crazed and hungry men desperate for rest. Even the old lion Kitchener was horrified. "This," he exclaimed "is not war!' Whatever it was, if finally came to an end when the rains turned to snow and the mud froze hard and the impossibility of achieving anything became to obvious to be ignored. Both sides claimed victory, the Enente because they had held on to Ypres and kept the Germans from reaching the Channel ports, the Germans not only because they had kept the enemy from breaking through not because by the end they had captured so many of the strong points around the destroyed town that the British and French no longer had an adequate base from which to launch new offensives.
By the time the Flanders front shut down for the winter, the British had taken 50,000 casualties there. More than half of the 160,000 men that Britain had by then sent to France were dead or wounded France's Ypres losses are believed to exceed 50,000, Germany's at least 100,000. Burke's Peerage, the registry of Britain's noble had to postpone publication of its latest edition to make the editorial changes required by the death in combat of 66 peers, 95 sons of peers, 16 baronets, 82 sons of baronets, and 6 knights.
The Russian retreat across Poland continued, with the Germans in pursuit. First the Russians tried to withdraw behind an expanse of wet lowland marshes, but the Germans drove them out. Then they tried to make a stand at the city of Lodz, but on December 6th they were again forced to move on. They had lost another 90,000 men at Lodz, the Germans 35,000. The Germans were 30 miles east of Lodz, and in possession of a 136,000 Russian prisoners, when their drive finally came to a stop. Winter made the stop necessary-the killing Russian winter. "Only about half had overcoats," an English war correspondent observed of German soldiers captured in a Russian counterattack. "and these were made of thin, shoddy material that is about as much protection as paper against the Russian wind. When you know that the prison camps are all in Siberia, try and think of the lot of prisoners. Yet for the moment the Germans were content. They were allowed to sleep. This is the boon that the man fresh from the trenches asks above all things. His days and nights have been one constant strain of alertness. His brain has been racked with the roar of cannon and his nerves frayed by the irregular bursting of shell. His mind is chaos... But when a soldier is once captured he feels that this responsibility of holding back the enemy is no longer his. He has failed. Well, he can sleep in peace now."
Both sides settled down to hacking makeshift defenses out of the frozen earth. The Germans had lost a 100,000 men in this last 1914 campaign while inflicting the astounding total of 530,000 casualties on the Russians. Their success, however, was of discouragingly limited value. As winter arrived, the Russians had 120 divisions on the front, and each division included 12 battalions. The Germans and Austrians together could muster only 60 divisions of 8 battalions each.
For Conrad and his armies, December was a month of high drama, of brief glory followed by final humiliation. As it opened, one of the Russian armies advancing against the Carpathians had taken possession of a mountain pass that gave it a gateway into Hungary. The commander of this Russian 8th army, a talented general named Alexei Brusilov, was in position to advance on Budapest and begin the conquest of the Hapsburg homeland. But at just this moment Conrad tried something that worked. He learned of a gap between Brusilov and the Russian army on its right, assembled an attack force, and on December 3rd drove it into the gap. The Russians were thrown off balance. In 4 days Conrad drove them back 40 miles. Though the masses of reinforcements sent forward out of the Russians reserve brought him to a halt by December 10th, the victory was an important one. It spoiled the Russians' hopes of crossing the Carpathians. It also rendered them incapable of executing a newly hatched plan to send a force from Krakow toward Germany. In combination with Hindenburg's and Ludendorff's November successes in Poland, it left the Russians bogged for the winter far from Berlin, Budapest, and Vienna.
Conrad poisoned his own hour of triumph by launching a year-end invasion of Serbia, his 3rd since the start of the war. The newest incursion started as promisingly as the others, with the Austrians quickly taking possession of much of the Serbian interior along with Belgrade. Just one day after the fall of Belgrade, however, in a moment of Balkan high drama, the mustachioed King Peter of Serbia, rifle in hand, announced to his soldiers that he was releasing them from their pledge to fight for him and the homeland but that he for one was going to the front, alone if necessary. This gesture rallied every doubting patriot to the cause. A counterattack organized by Serbian General Radomir Putnik-the same old soldier who had been caught vacationing in Austrian territory when the war began but was allowed to return home in an act of almost medieval courtesy by Emperor Franz Joseph-sent 200,000 Serb troops down on the overextended Austrians. The Austrians, who had gone days without food and were freezing in summer uniforms, fled back across the border. Again their losses were outlandish: 28,000 dead, a 120,000 wounded, 76,000 taken prisoner. The Serbs too had been badly hurt, with 22,000 wounded, 92,000 wounded, 9,000 captured or missing, and the survivors ravaged by dysentery and chlorea.
Never again, in the years of fighting that lay ahead, would the Austro-Hungarians be involved in a major offensive as anything more than adjuncts to the Germans. Never again would they win a major victory they could call their own. With the war scarcely begun, they were a spent force. With almost 4 years of war remaining, nearly 200,000 of Vienna's best troops-including ruinors numbers of its experienced officers and noncoms-were dead. Almost half a million had been wounded, and some 180,000 were prisoners of the Russians. There was fighting elsewhere as the year drew to a close. Even after the last assault at Ypres, the Western Front was never entirely quiet. Joffre kept ordering attacks wherever he thought the enemy wall might be weak. "Nibbling," he called it, but its cost in lives was high. By March it would add another 100,000 casualties to the French total.
People were becoming accustomed to the term world war. Since August there had been naval battles, some of them high in drama but none terribly important, all around the globe. There was bloodshed in Africa as the police and small military forces of the various European colonies jockeyed for advantage and the indigenous populations became involved, and in the Far East Japan helped itself to Germany's scattered holding.
The Middle East was being drawn in as well. The newest member of the Central Powers, Turkey, sent troops based in Syria into Persia. After so many years of watching the Europeans feast on its crumbling empire, the government in Constantinople was eager to recover some of its losses at last.
The British, in particular, were disturbed. When Russia suggested that a show of force near Istanbul might frighten the Turks and cause them to pull back from Persia, London found the idea attractive. A battleship was dispatched to the mouth of the Dardanelles, the narrow channel leading from the northeastern Mediterranean to Constantinople, the Black Sea, and Russia beyond. Upon arrival, the ship began shelling one of the outermost forts guarding the Dardanelles. Within half and hour the for was totally wrecked, incapable of defending itself or the sea route to Constantinople.
The battleship, never, threatened while it did its work, steamed serenely away. The whole thing had been so easy. First Lord of the Admiralty Churchill began to wonder: might the entire passage up to Constantinople be that easily taken.
In Flanders, where there had been so much horror, 1914 ended with a strange spontaneous eruption of fellow feeling. On Christmas morning, in their trenches began singing carols and displaying bits of evergreen decorated in observance of the occasion. The Tommies too began to sing.
Cautiously, unarmed Germans began showing themselves atop their defenses. Some of the British did the same. Step by Step this led to the gathering in no-man's-land of soldiers from both sides, to exchange of food and cigarettes, even games of soccer.
This was the Christmas Truce of 1914, and in places it continued for more than a day. The generals, indignant when they learned of the kind would happen again.
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