The East Prussian victory greatly bolstered the morale of the Germans: for they had not only inflicted heavy losses on the Russians and saved their homeland from invasion but succeeded, with inferior forces and relatively small casualties, in stopping dead the Russian hordes. In a symbolic gesture, intended to avenge the defeat of the Teutonic Knights at the hands of the Poles and Lithuanians near the village of Tannenberg five centuries earlier, they designated their victory the “Battle of Tannenberg.”
These disasters did not have a correspondingly debilitating effect on the morale of the Russians because they were in some measure offset by their victories over the Austrians. In mid-August, Russian armies broke the enemy front in Galicia, forcing the Austrians into disorganized retreat. At the end of the month, at the very time when Samsonov’s troops were in headlong flight, the Russians approached the capital of Galicia, Lemberg (Lwow), which they captured on September 3. One hundred thousand prisoners of war and 400 artillery guns fell into their hands: they had put out of commission one-third of the Austro-Hungarian army. Before long, advance units of Russian cavalry, having crossed the Carpathian Mountains, reconnoitered the Hungarian plain, while the main Russian force approached Cracow and menaced Silesia.
24. Nicholas II at army headquarters: September 1914. Sitting by him, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, the Commander in Chief. In rear on left, Generals Danilov and Ianushkevich.
Russian successes against the Austrians cast a shadow on German jubilation because of the danger they posed to Germany’s rear. In early September, responding to Austrian pleas, the German High Command hastily assembled a fresh army, the Ninth, which under Hindenburg was to attack Warsaw and threaten from the north Russian forces in Galicia.
The next seven months on the Eastern Front were spent on intense but inconclusive fighting, none of the principals enjoying enough power to gain a decision. Hindenburg’s advance on Warsaw was checked by Russian bravery and Austrian vacillation. The Russians, for their part, proved unable to penetrate into Silesia because of the threat to their flanks from the north, while the Germans lacked the forces to compel them to withdraw from Galicia. As the winter of 1914–15 drew to a close, the Eastern Front fairly stabilized.
It was then that the Russians began first to experience shortages in military matériel. As early as the end of 1914, one-half of the replacements reaching the front had no rifles.50 In a major engagement fought near the Polish town of Przasnysz in February 1915, Russian troops charged the Germans virtually with bare hands:
The battle was fought under conditions which are scarcely to be paralleled from the history of modern war. Russia, hard put to it for munitions and arms, was unable to equip masses of the trained men that she had ready, and it was the custom to have unarmed troops in the rear of any action, who could be used to fill gaps and take up the weapons of the dead. At Przasnysz men were flung into the firing line without rifles, armed only with a sword-bayonet in one hand and a bomb in the other. That meant fighting, desperate fighting, at the closest quarters. The Russians had to get at all costs within range to throw their bombs, and then they charged with cold steel. This was berserker warfare, a defiance of all modern rules, a return to conditions of primitive combat.51
The Russians won this particular engagement, which helped to stem the German drive on Warsaw. But their casualties in the first five months of war were staggering: by December 1914 they had lost in killed, wounded, missing, and prisoners of war (mostly the latter) 1.2 million men, among them a high proportion of junior and noncommissioned officers for whom there were no ready replacements. In October 1914 and again in February 1915, the army called up 700,000 fresh recruits, men in their early twenties, who were given four weeks’ training and sent to the front. As yet the older reservists were spared.52
The Russian army kept on massing reserves in the rear. To this end it adopted a policy that was convenient and cheap, but destined to have the most calamitous political consequences. While some of the inducted reservists were billeted and trained near the front, the majority—fully three-quarters—were housed in major cities in barracks occupied in peacetime by regiments, then in combat, to which they were assigned as replacements. This caused no problem as long as the regime held together, but later on, in early 1917, these urban reserve garrisons, filled with sullen conscripts from the National Militia, would become the principal breeding ground of revolutionary discontent.
After months of savage fighting, Russia wanted to make sure she would receive compensation for her sacrifices: she wanted, above all, Constantinople and the Straits, major objectives of her foreign policy since the eighteenth century. She was stimulated to demand this prize by the British action against the Turks in Gallipoli, which was designed to open a naval passage to Russia. Rather than welcoming this operation, which might free her of the blockade, and joining in it, as she had promised, Russia grew anxious about British designs on the area. On March 4, 1915 (NS), the Foreign Minister Sazonov dispatched a note to the French and British governments claiming for his country Constantinople and the Straits as a prize of war. The Allies reluctantly acceded to this demand from fear that Russia might sign a separate peace with Germany and limit her military operations to the Turks. A year later, in the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement between France and England, which provided for the division of the Ottoman Empire, Russia was allotted, in addition, generous territories in eastern and northeastern Anatolia.
Surveying the situation after three months of combat, the German High Command faced a bleak prospect. Schlieffen’s grand strategic design had failed: the Western Front had solidified, with neither side able to make significant advances. No quick victory was in sight here. Germany now confronted the prospect of a protracted two-front war, which her generals had worked so assiduously to avoid. Von Moltke the Younger, the chief of the General Staff at the outbreak of the war, concluded as early as the beginning of September 1914 that the war may well have been lost.53
The only remaining hope of victory lay in knocking Russia out of the war. Moltke expressed a view that gained ascendancy toward the end of 1914: that the decision had to be reached on the Eastern Front because the French would not sue for peace as long as the Russians held on, but would do so once their ally had gone down in defeat. “Our general military situation is now so critical,” he advised the Kaiser in January 1915, “that only a complete and full success in the east can save it.”54 An additional argument in favor of launching a major offensive in the east was to keep the demoralized Austrians from dropping out of the war and leaving Germany’s southeastern frontier exposed to Russian invasion. From these considerations, late in 1914, at the urging of Hindenburg and Ludendorff, but against the advice of Falkenhayn, the German High Command decided to launch early in the spring an all-out offensive against the Russians for the purpose of annihilating their forces and compelling them to sue for peace. German troops in the west were ordered to dig themselves in: thus began the static trench warfare that was to dominate operations there for the next three years. Concurrently, in utmost secrecy, the Germans began to transfer established and newly formed divisions to the east. By the time spring arrived they had assembled, south of Cracow, unbeknownst to the enemy, an Eleventh Army under General August von Mackensen, of ten infantry divisions and one division of cavalry. This army was reinforced in the months that followed, until by September 1915 over two-thirds of German combat divisions (sixty-five out of ninety) were deployed on the Eastern Front. In April, the Germans enjoyed a considerable advantage in manpower over the Russians and an overwhelming superiority in heavy artillery, forty German guns facing one Russian. The strategic plan called for a giant pincer movement: Mackensen, assisted by the Austrian Fourth Army, was to drive the Russians in a northeasterly direction, whereupon the German Twelfth Army would strike southeast from Pomerania. When the two met, they would have trapped up to four Russian armies, as well as cut off Warsaw.55