THE DEFEAT OF RUSSIA
THE winter, spring, and summer which had passed with so little change
on the other fronts, owed their lack of decisive movement not to the
comforting delusion of the French official communiqué that Germany's
offensive had been broken and her defensive could be broken whenever
it was thought desirable, but to the fact that she had reversed her
strategy, and reached the conclusion that Russia could be defeated
more easily than France. Russia, indeed, had almost limitless
man-power, but the war had already shown the importance of munitions,
and Germany quickly learnt the lesson. Russia was ill-equipped with
munitions and the industrial facilities for their manufacture; nor
could the want be supplied by her allies, since, apart from their own
needs, their communications with Russia were circuitous, uncertain,
and inadequate. The Murmansk railway was not complete, the route to
Archangel was icebound from November to May, and the single rail
across Siberia was further hampered by indolence and corruption on the
part of the railway workers and their staff. Russia was the most
isolated of the Allies, and the attempt to open a shorter connexion by
a naval attack on the Dardanelles had been frustrated. Without
assistance from the West, Russia would be beaten, and without it she
could not recover. There were good reasons for the policy which led
Germany, during the winter and behind an unpenetrated veil of secrecy,
to concentrate her energies upon the production of guns and munitions
for the Eastern front.
The strategical position of Russia was no more sound than the state of
her armaments. She occupied a vast salient, the southern flank of
which was the Carpathians. They formed a substantial protection, since
the passes afforded poor facilities for transporting the mass of
artillery on which Germany relied for success in her attack. But the
safety of the flank depended upon the integrity of the front, and a
successful German drive in Galicia would expose the entire position of
the Russian armies in Poland. The two reasons subsequently given for
the dismissal of the Grand Duke Nicholas from the supreme command
were, firstly, that he had in the autumn advanced too precipitately
into Silesia, and secondly, that in the spring he exhausted his
strength in trying to pierce the Carpathians and thus left his front
on the Dunajec too weak to resist Mackensen's furious onslaught. But
it is doubtful whether any strategic correctitude could have saved the
Russian armies from the effects of German superior armaments. The
Germans were playing for high stakes, nothing less than the
destruction of Russia's offensive capacity; but they were justified in
their game by the cards they held in their hand.
The attack began on 28 April with a forward move on Dmitrieff's left
at Gorlice. The pressure compelled him to weaken his centre along the
Biala in front of Ciezkowice. Then on 1 May Mackensen's vast volume of
fire burst forth; over 700,000 shells are said to have fallen upon the
Russian position, and their defences were blown out of existence.
Under cover of this fire, to which the Russians could make little
reply, the Biala was crossed, Ciezkowice and Gorlice were captured,
and Dmitrieff's line was broken; on the 2nd his army was in full
retreat to the Wisloka, twenty miles back in his rear, where no
trenches had been dug, and there was little hope of checking the
Germans. Nevertheless a heroic stand was here made for five days by
Caucasian and other reinforcements. On the 7th Mackensen forced a
crossing at Jaslo, and next day he pursued his advantage by seizing
two bridgeheads across the Wistok farther on, one at Fryslak to the
north and the other at Rymanow to the south. Brussilov's army along
the Carpathian foothills at Dukla had to beat a precipitate retreat
and lost heavily; it was nearly severed from Dmitrieff's centre. But a
counterattack from Sanok in the south and a stand by the Russians at
Dembica towards the north procured a slight respite, and by the 14th
the bulk of the Russian armies were across the San with their right at
Jaroslav, their left at Kosziowa, their centre at Przemysl, and their
forces in Poland conforming to the retirement.
The latter part of the retreat had been of a more orderly character
and began to follow a plan, but the plan involved a great deal more
than the surrender of Galicia between the San and the Dunajec.
Mackensen's force was overpowering, and the German design was not to
lengthen the line by compelling a Russian retreat to the San; it only
fell short of complete success because the Russian armies had not so
far been isolated and destroyed, but there was still the likelihood of
their being driven back until the whole of Galicia was recovered and
Poland lost. For the rest of the month Mackensen's huge machine of
destruction was moving forward to the second stage of its journey on
the San. Its progress was delayed by Russian counter-attacks on the
Austrians under Von Woyrsch in Poland and on Mackensen's other wing
which was advancing from the Carpathians on to the Dniester. But by
the 18th Kosziowa had fallen and the Germans had seized the line of
the San from Sieniawa to Jaroslav. Przemysl had not been further
fortified by the Russians since its capture; it would clearly meet the
same fate as Antwerp from the German howitzers unless the Russian
armies in the field could keep the German artillery at a distance.
They could only delay matters until the stores and material were
removed from the fortress. It was now a salient threatened with
encirclement on the north and south. Russian counter-attacks at
Sieniawa and Mosciska relieved the pressure for some days, but before
the end of May Mackensen's howitzers were at work, and Przemysl was
evacuated by the Russians on 1 June.
On the same day Stryj fell to Von Linsingen and on 7 June he forced
the Dniester at Zurawno. But he had advanced too far ahead of his
communications and reserves, and on the 8th Brussilov drove him back
over the Dniester with severe losses. The Dniester was indeed the
scene of stubborn fighting for many days, and on the 18th the Russian
Government announced that the enemy had lost between 120,000 and
150,000 men in their efforts to cross it on a front of forty miles.
But the Russian stand on the Dniester only left it to Mackensen's
centre and left to turn the Grodek position and ensure the fall of
Lemberg. By 20 June the Russian communications north of the Galician
capital were severed by a battle at Rawa Ruska, and on the 22nd, after
nine months' Russian occupation, it once more fell into Austrian
hands. The Russians had not done much to commend their cause to the
inhabitants during their stay; the opportunity was seized for
proselytizing in the interests of the Orthodox Church, and Sczeptycki
the Archbishop of Lemberg, a member of the Uniate Church which had
made terms with Roman Catholicism, was treated with a harshness
compared with which the indignities inflicted by the Germans upon
Cardinal Mercier of Malines were trivial; he was interned in a Russian
monastery and deprived of all religious rites save those which were to
him heretical.
The fall of Lemberg was followed by the loss of the Dniester line as
far as Halicz, and all beyond it including the Bukovina, and the
Russians fell back behind the Gnilia Lipa, where Ivanov prolonged a
stubborn resistance. But the aims of the Germans in Galicia had been
achieved with the capture of Lemberg except in so far as the remnants
of the Russian armies remained intact. The city formed a formidable
bastion for defence because of its ample lines of communication with
the south and west, and inadequate lines to the north and east. A
farther German advance across the Russian frontier in that direction
would be an eccentric movement, and the front of attack was
accordingly swung round from east to north, where the Russian position
in Poland had been outflanked. The reconquest of Galicia produced
fruits enough in the restoration of Austrian and Hungarian confidence
and the repression of pro-Entente tendencies in the Balkans. But it
was only a part of the most ambitious and successful campaign the
Germans fought in the war. May and June were but the prelude to
greater successes in July, August, and September.
The heaviest blows were to be struck in the Polish centre, but
diversions had already been made on the extreme German left in the
north. Libau had fallen on 9 May, and during that and the following
month the German armies under Von Buelow overran the duchy of Courland
as far as Windau on the coast and Shavli half-way to Riga. This
movement was regarded with comparative indifference as being a
divergent operation calculated at worst to do no more than distract
Russian forces from more critical points. But it was in keeping with a
German design considered grandiose until it nearly succeeded. The bulk
of Russia's forces were concentrated in the Polish triangle of which
the apex was at Warsaw, the base ran from Kovno by Brest-Litovsk to
the Galician frontier, the north-western side in front of the railway
from Kovno to Warsaw, and the southern in front of that from Warsaw to
Lublin, Cholm, Kovel, Rovno, and Kiev. The German plan was not merely
to squeeze the Russians out of the triangle by pressure on the sides
and intercept as much of their forces as possible, but also to
outflank the whole position by striking behind the base from the north
at Vilna; and a naval attack on Riga was part of the projected
operations.
The Galician drive had furnished the territorial means for the attack
on the southern side of the Polish triangle; and although Ivanov was
farther pushed back from the Gnilia Lipa to the Strypa and thence
almost to the Sereth, this Eastern advance became irrelevant to the
main strategic design, and German reinforcements were collecting
mostly under Gallwitz, Scholtz, and Von Eichhorn along the Narew and
the Niemen for an onslaught on the north-western side of the triangle.
The Austrian Prince Leopold's forces which fronted Warsaw on the Bzura
at the apex were comparatively weak, and were only intended to gather
the fruits of the real fighting done by the Germans on the flanks. The
Germans rode roughshod enough over Austrian susceptibilities when
efficiency required it; but they atoned for the brusqueness by
conceding a large share in the spectacular aspects of triumph; and
just as the Austrians entered Lemberg first and not its real conqueror
Mackensen, so Prince Leopold was cast for the part of the victor of
Warsaw. But first of all the Galician armies had to face north to take
their allotted share in the scheme by driving the Russians back across
the railway between Lublin and Kovel.
Within a few days of the fall of Lemberg they had crossed the Russian
frontier, turning the Vistula and advancing in two columns, one under
the Archduke Joseph towards Krasnik on the road to Lublin, and the
other farther east under Mackensen towards Krasnostav on the way to
Cholm. The Russian army in Poland west of the Vistula had gradually to
conform to the retreating line and fall back in a north-easterly
direction towards the river. By 2 July the Archduke was in Krasnik,
but here he was checked by the Russian position defending the railway
line; on the 5th the Russians, who had been reinforced,
counter-attacked, and in a battle lasting till the 9th drove the
Austrians back. Similarly Mackensen found himself held up between
Zamosc and Krasnostav, and for a week the struggle for the Lublin-
Cholm railway resolved itself into an artillery duel. The attack was
resumed on the 16th simultaneously with Von Gallwitz's movement
against the other side of the triangle. The Archduke failed after ten
assaults to carry the Russian position in front of him at Wilkolaz,
but Mackensen was more successful at Krasnostav. He enveloped the
Russian right, drove it beyond Krasnostav, and was soon within
striking distance of the railway.
Meanwhile, to the north Gallwitz had forced the Russians from Prasnysz
towards the Narew on the 14th, and crossed it himself on the 23rd
between Pultusk and Rozhan as well as between Ostrolenka and Lomza;
and by the 25th he was on the banks of the Bug, within twenty miles of
the railway connecting Warsaw with Petrograd. The great line of
fortresses along the Narew were now exposed to bombardment by German
howitzers; the Russians in front of Warsaw withdrew from their winter
defences along the Rawka and Bzura to the inner lines of Blonie; and
south of Warsaw they retired from Opatow, then from Radom, and then to
the great fortress of Ivangorod on the Vistula. Even that was now
threatened by Mackensen's advance to the Lublin line in its rear. It
was broken on the 29th, and on the 30th the Germans were in Lublin and
Cholm. Warsaw was doomed, and, indeed, the Grand Duke Nicholas had as
early as the 15th decided upon its evacuation. The fighting along the
Lublin-Cholm line, and the strenuous resistance the Russians offered
on the 26th to Gallwitz's renewed attacks on the Narew, were intended
not to save Warsaw, but the armies defending and the stores within it.
On 4 August the troops abandoned the Blonie lines and marched through
the city, blowing up the bridges across the Vistula. Next day Prince
Leopold made his triumphal entry, and the first year of the war closed
on the Eastern front with an event of greater significance even than
that which the Kaiser attached to it. To him the capture of Warsaw was
a resounding tribute to the success of German arms: to future
generations the import of the Russian departure will doubtless be the
term it set to Russian rule in Poland, and it may be deemed one of the
ironies of history that Hohenzollern autocracy should have been made
the instrument to wreck the Russian domination. In spite of themselves
the Germans assisted to achieve the common purposes of the great war
of liberation.
Russian autocracy was indeed stricken to death by its own inherent
maladies nearer home than Poland. Shallow democrats in the West were
deploring the lack of prevision and provision exhibited by their
democratic Governments, but no democracy endured a tithe of the
sufferings inflicted upon Russian soldiers by the blindness,
incompetence, and corruption of the bureaucratic Tsardom. Confident in
the successes which the heroism of its troops had won over the
discordant forces of the Hapsburg Empire and those which Germany could
spare from the Western front, it had neglected to perform any of the
promises it had made to conciliate the inhabitants of Poland and
Galicia, and had even failed to take the commonest military
precautions to safeguard its victories. Nothing had been done in
Galicia to put the captured Przemysl into a state of defence, and even
the bridge across the San had not been repaired to provide a direct
line of supply to the front on the Dunajec. Offers of skilled labour
from other countries to improve the inefficient service of Russian
railways and the inept direction of industries and munition factories
were ignored. The business organization of Russia had been managed
mainly by Germans before the war; too much of it was left in their
hands after war began, with the result that the Putilov munition
works, for instance, were reduced to half-time by German control; and
there was no one to take the place of those who departed. Russian
generals were among the most skilful of strategists, and men like
Ruszky, Alexeiev, Brussilov, and others would have been invincible had
Russia's man-power been competently equipped. As it was, every sort of
provision was neglected; the artillery of one army was limited to two
shells a day; a whole division had on one occasion to face an attack
without a rifle among them, and troops were put into trenches relying
for weapons on those which fell from the hands of their dead or
wounded comrades. These were the organized atrocities of autocratic
bureaucracy, and it was little wonder that in time they bred in the
breasts of Russian soldiers a fiercer resentment against their rulers
who betrayed them than against the enemy whom they fought.
The retreat which followed the fall of Warsaw was sympathetically
represented as a masterly operation, and the failure of the Germans to
envelop and isolate the Russian armies as proof of the breakdown of
their strategy. But all retreats in the war, with the exception of the
Turks' before Allenby, were similarly described in the appropriate
quarters. It was the common characteristic of the victors that they
could not win decisive battles in the sense of earlier wars, and of
the vanquished that they evaded the expected Sedans and Waterloos.
Even the Germans with all their initial advantages of preparation and
surprise could not break the Allied armies in their first offensive on
the West, and the same inability dogged their still more rapid
footsteps in the East. It is a consequence of the reliance of modern
armies on the mechanical force of artillery to which the Germans were
especially addicted; for while 16-inch howitzers could pulverise any
position, they could not pursue with the speed required to encircle
and capture armies in the field. Hence salients, which when viewed in
the light of older conditions seemed traps which could not be eluded,
were in practice evaded because, with Allenby's one exception, cavalry
failed to atone for the slower movement of the more powerful arm of
artillery. There was nothing therefore miraculous in the Russian
escape, and the strategy of the Grand Duke was hardly so brilliant as
it was represented. At the beginning of the war Alexeiev, then
Ivanov's chief of staff, is said to have counselled a Russian retreat
like those which lured Charles XII and Napoleon to their doom; but the
temptations of Austrian weakness and German concentration on the West
and the plight of France and Belgium led to the adoption of other
advice and the premature invasion of Prussia, Galicia, and Hungary;
and in August 1915 it was too late for a voluntary and innocuous
retreat. The safety of the majority had to be bought at a heavy price
in casualties, in loss of guns and material, in suffering for the
troops and civilians, and in national dejection. What might have been
cheerfully done by choice was despondently done by compulsion.
The evacuation of Warsaw was the first step in the withdrawal from the
apex of the Polish triangle which it was hoped the resistance of the
sides would enable the Russians to complete without disaster; and a
large garrison with adequate guns and ammunition was left at Novo
Georgievsk to impede the German advance and hamper communications with
their front. The greatest menace was on the north-west along the Narew
and beyond in Courland where Von Buelow was preparing to strike behind
the base of the triangle. On 10 August Von Scholtz breached the line
of fortresses by storming Lomza, but Kovno was a much more critical
point. It was the angle of the base, and its fall would not only
threaten the base running south to Brest-Litovsk and all the Russian
armies west of that line, but would greatly facilitate Von Buelow's
sweep round beyond it and Vilna. The bombardment began on the day that
Warsaw fell. Kovno was expected to hold out at least to the end of the
month, but it fell on the 17th, and the general in command was
subsequently sentenced to fifteen years' hard labour for his
inadequate defence and absence from his post of duty. On the following
day Von Gallwitz cut the line between Kovno and Brest at Bielsk, and
on the 19th Novo Georgievsk fell to the howitzers of Von Beseler, the
expert of Antwerp. Ossowiec, which had stood so well against the
earlier German invasions, followed on the 23rd, and Von Beseler was
brought up to give the coup de grâce to Brest. Its loss was perhaps
inevitable after the fall of Kovno, but it completed the destruction
of the base of the triangle and involved the withdrawal of the whole
Russian line beyond the Pripet marshes which would break its
continuity; and there was cold comfort in the fact that Ewarts got
away with most of his troops and stores and that a Russian mine,
exploded two days after their departure, destroyed a thousand Germans
and set a precedent for similar machinations on their part when they
retreated in the West.
Fortresses now toppled down like ninepins. On the 26th Augustowo was
evacuated and Bialystok captured. On the 27th Olita was abandoned and
on 2 September Grodno. The Germans thus gained the whole line from
Kovno to Brest, and things were going no better in the south. The fall
of Lemberg had given the German right a position far to the east of
their left, and Mackensen advancing from Lublin and Cholm had driven
the Russians across the Bug at Wlodawa before Brest-Litovsk was taken.
The marshes of Pripet were at their driest in August, and Mackensen
encountered few obstacles as he pressed on from Brest to Kobrin and
thence to Pinsk along the rail to Moscow. In Galicia Ivanov was pushed
back to the Strypa and then the Sereth, and on the upper reaches of
those rivers Brody was captured and two of the Volhynian fortresses,
Dubno and Lutsk. Rovno itself was threatened, and with it the southern
stretch of that lateral railway from Riga to Lemberg on which the
Germans had set their hearts.
But the most ominous German advance was far to the north, where Von
Buelow was profiting by the fall of Kovno, marching on Mitau and Riga,
and threatening both to cut the railway between Vilna and Petrograd
and confine the Russian retreat to congested and narrow lines of
communication along which they could not escape. This northern advance
was accompanied by a naval offensive in the Baltic, designed to seize
Riga and turn the line of the Dvina on which the Russians hoped to
stand in the last resort. Fortunately this part of the campaign broke
down before matters had reached their worst on land. It looked like a
naval operation planned, or at least attempted, by soldiers
professionally incapable of grasping the elementary principles of
naval or amphibious warfare. After an unsuccessful attack on the
southern inlet to the Gulf of Riga on 10 August, the Germans during a
thick fog on the 17th sought to land troops at Pernau in large
flat-bottomed barges without having secured command of the sea; and
the entire landing-force was captured or destroyed. Simultaneously
the Russian Fleet engaged the Germans, who had eight destroyers and
two cruisers sunk or put out of action; the only Russian vessel lost
was an old gunboat. The Dvina lines were not to be turned by strategy
like this, and Russia was henceforth free from naval interference
until her sailors played her false.
Von Buelow was still, however, to be reckoned with, and he was the
substantial danger. On 28 August he began his movement against the
Dvina, which would, if successful, cut off all the Russian armies from
direct communication with Petrograd. The blow was struck at
Friedrichstadt, where the river is crossed by the only practicable
road between Riga and Jacobstadt, but the design was to turn the whole
front as far as Dvinsk; and Von Buelow held out to his troops the
alluring prospect of winter quarters in Riga and a march on Petrograd
in the spring. On 3 September the left bank was cleared for some
miles, but all attempts to cross were frustrated. The out-march on the
extreme German left had failed, and the critical point moved south
towards Vilna. The danger here was serious enough, for the depletion
of the Russian forces and length of their line had left a gap between
Dvinsk and Vilna, and into this gap the Germans thrust a huge cavalry
force which more nearly turned the Russian line than any other
movement in the campaign.
The way was prepared by the great ten-days' battle of Meiszagola. The
unexpectedly rapid fall of Kovno and Grodno had enabled the Germans to
threaten the envelopment of Ewarts' army both on the south and the
north, on the Niemen towards Mosty and Lida and farther north towards
Vilna. The struggle for Vilna was decided at Meiszagola, a village
about fifteen miles north-west of the old Lithuanian capital. It was
captured on 12 September, and masses of German cavalry swept round
from Vilkomir towards Sventsiany and crossed the Petrograd railway to
outflank the retreating Russian troops. The evacuation of Vilna began
on the 13th, and two days later the menace from the German cavalry
became more apparent. Fresh divisions were apparently brought up from
Courland with 140 guns; on the 16th they were at Vidzy and on the 17th
at Vileika, nearly seventy miles due east of Vilna and in the rear of
the Russians escaping thence. They were thus also close to Molodetchno
on the railway along which Ewarts was falling back from Skidel, Mosty,
and Lida; and control of that junction would have put two Russian
armies at their mercy.
Just in time Ruszky was restored to the command of the northern group
of Russian armies, and the victor of Rawa Ruska and Prasnysz was not
doomed now to break his uniform record of success. The situation was
not unlike that at Prasnysz, and it was relieved in a similar way by a
Russian counter-offensive from Dvinsk against the flank of the German
cavalry. Vidzy was recaptured on the 20th, and farther south the
pressure slackened along the Vilna-Vileika railway; Smorgon was
retaken by a brilliant bayonet charge on the 21st. The door had been
kept from closing on Russian armies seeking to escape from the salient
between Lida and Molodetchno, while the Germans were squeezed out of
that which they had made to the north. They were driven out of
Vileika, and gradually the lines were straightened and stabilized so
as to run almost due south from Dvinsk by Postavy, Lake Narotch, and
Smorgon. Other factors than Ruszky's brilliant strategy contributed to
this dramatic defeat of the final German effort of the campaign to
annihilate the Russian forces. The Germans had lost in men and impetus
during their long advance. Superb though their organization was,
lengthening lines of communication across a country ill-supplied with
roads and railways, and the necessity of guarding against a hostile
population told upon their armies in the fighting-line. The heaviest
blow will spend itself in time against an elusive foe, and the longest
arm will find the limit of its reach. The Germans had not planned a
march on Moscow, but they had hoped to overrun the Russian armies and
occupy the winter quarters of their choice. These were denied them on
the Dvina, and they had not secured the coveted Riga-Rovno line.
They were indeed left farther from it in the south than in the north.
Their defeat east of Vilna enabled Ewarts to escape from the
encirclement threatened by the advance from Kovno and Grodno; and
although he had to leave Lida and was subsequently pushed behind the
junction of Baranowitchi, thus surrendering to the Germans the control
of the railway from Vilna to that point, it remained in Russian hands
to Rovno. Mackensen was unable to advance from Pinsk, which he
occupied on 16 September, to the railway at Luninetz, while Ivanov
reacted successfully against the German attacks along the Kovel-Sarny
line and recovered a good deal of the ground lost in the Volhynian
triangle and eastern extremity of Galicia. Mackensen's army may have
been weakened by calls from the north and from the south for a
campaign which was already planned but not yet suspected; at any rate
it was too weak to achieve its objectives, the capture of Sarny,
Rovno, and Tarnopol, which would have completed the hold of the
Germans on the Vilna-Kovno line and given them a base for a farther
advance in the spring on Odessa and for the isolation of Rumania. On 7
September, as Mackensen's forces were moving on Rovno and the Sereth
at Tarnopol and Trembowla, Ivanov counter-attacked from Rovno and
Brussilov and Lechitzky on the Sereth. By the 9th the two latter had
captured 17,000 prisoners and a considerable number of guns; and
Ivanov followed up this success by retaking Lutsk and Dubno by the
23rd. Kovel was even threatened, but the pressure was not maintained.
Sarny, Rovno, and Tarnopol were saved, but Lutsk and Dubno reverted to
the Germans, and the line in the east was stabilized with the
Volhynian triangle and the railway from Vilna to Rovno divided between
the antagonists.
The success of Ruszky in the north and of Ivanov in the south in
setting a term to the terrifying sweep of the German advance produced
a temporary optimism in Russia comparable with that which followed the
victory on the Marne; and in neither case did the Allies realize the
extent of the advantage gained by the Germans or foresee the years
that would pass before the loss could be recovered. The Grand Duke
Nicholas was relieved of his command and sent to take over that in the
Caucasus. He was succeeded by the Tsar himself, who was unlikely to
interfere with the military measures of Alexeiev, his chief of staff;
and the Duma seconded the Tsar's attempt to express the determination
of the Russian peoples to withstand the Germans until victory was
secured. Nevertheless, the profound effects of the Russian defeat
could not be removed by any laudable efforts at keeping up
appearances. It was a resounding disaster which condemned Europe to
three more years of war, and Russia to a convulsion which would
permanently alter the whole course of her history and position in the
world. Miliukov raised in the Duma the question of responsible
government, and if the debacle of 1915 was slower than Sedan in
producing the downfall of the system to which it was due, it was not
because the disaster was less, but because Russia was a less organized
country than France, and her illiterate population reacted more slowly
than the French.
The Russian Front
At the moment the best face was put on affairs; and although one
correspondent was allowed to report that the heart of the Russian
people had grown cold to the Allies who had watched their misfortunes
without raising a finger in the shape of a serious offensive to help,
public opinion was fed on the comfort in which a facile optimism is so
fertile. German casualties were multiplied at will, despondent diaries
of individual German officers killed or captured were given unlimited
publicity, and roseate pictures were painted of the colossal drain of
man-power involved in winter trench-warfare in Russia and in holding
vast tracts of hostile country. It was assumed that the Germans would
suffer more than the Russians, although again and again whole Russian
battalions in those trenches were wiped out by German artillery and
machine guns to which the Russians had not the wherewithal to reply
except with fresh masses of human flesh; and little was said of the
millions of Russian prisoners and civilians who were put to far more
effective use in making munitions and producing food for their enemies
than they ever had been for Russia or themselves, and without whose
labour Germany's man-power would have been exhausted one or two years
before the end of the war. It was considered a triumph that the
Germans had not reached Petrograd or Moscow, but it might have been
well if they had. They had, however, no such ambitions. Just as the
reconquest of Galicia had been mainly designed as providing the base
for a flank attack upon Russia, so the conquest of Poland was to be
used as providing protection for Germany against Russian interference
with her plans in the Balkans. Sofia and Constantinople opened up more
alluring prospects and a path that led farther than Moscow or
Petrograd; and while public opinion in England and France was dreaming
of a repetition of 1812, public opinion in Germany was feasting on
visions of Cairo, Baghdad, and Teheran, and the possibility of evading
the British blockade through outlets to the Indian Ocean.
All eyes that could see were turned to the Dardanelles. There British
troops were making the one serious counter-offensive to the German
attack on Russia, and success would redeem the Russian failure and
foil the hopes the Germans were building upon their victory. The
immediate future of the Balkans, the Black Sea, and Asia Minor, and it
might be the more distant future of Egypt and the East, hung upon the
issue at Gallipoli. During July the reinforcements for which Sir Ian
Hamilton had asked were gathering in Egypt and in Gallipoli; and on 6
August the new plan of attack was begun. There were to be four
distinct items; a feint was to be made of landing north of Bulair, the
attack on Krithia was to be renewed in order to hold the Turkish
troops there and draw others in that direction, and a similar advance
was planned for the Anzacs with a similar motive, but also to
co-operate with the real and fresh offensive. This took the form of a
landing at Suvla Bay, the extreme north-westerly point of the
peninsula between Anzac and Bulair. The diversions were reasonably
successful, as successful, indeed, as previous attacks had been in
those localities when they were the principal efforts. The chief of
them was a threefold advance north-east, east, and south-east from
Anzac Cove on Sari Bair with its highest point at Koja-Chemen.
Conspicuous gallantry was shown in the three days' fighting; and
while, as earlier at Krithia, the summits defied the greatest valour,
enough progress was made in these subsidiary attacks to justify the
hope of general success if the principal effort at Suvla Bay went well
(see Map, p. 107).
It began without any great mishap, and General Stopford's 9th Corps
was successfully landed on the shores of Suvla Bay during the night of
6-7 August and deployed next morning in the plain without serious
resistance. The surprise had been effected, but it would be useless
unless the attack was pressed with energy and without delay. Yet
torpor crept over the enterprise during that torrid afternoon; many of
the troops were in action for the first time in their lives, and,
understanding that water was obtainable from the lake close by, they
had drained their water-bottles by eight o'clock in the morning. A
thunderstorm mended matters a little, and Chocolate Hill was carried
on the right. But all next day an inferior Turkish force, assisted by
a planned or accidental conflagration of the scrub, managed by skilful
use of a screen of sharpshooters to hold up our advance all along the
line. Sir Ian Hamilton himself arrived that night and strove by
persuasion to infuse some energy into the attack. But by the 9th it
was already too late, for the Turks had had time to bring up
reinforcements, and an attack on the Anafarta ridge on the 10th was
repulsed. Five days later General Stopford relinquished the command of
the 9th Corps, to which he had been somewhat reluctantly appointed by
Lord Kitchener, and the 29th Division was brought up from Cape Helles
to renew the attack on 21 August. It might have succeeded had it been
originally employed in place of the inexperienced troops; but by this
time there could be nothing but a frontal attack on a watchful foe,
and it ended like the similar efforts in May and June. Some ground was
gained, contact was established with the Anzacs, and a continuous line
of six miles was secured from the north of Suvla Bay to the south of
Anzac Cove. But before the Turks could be expelled from the peninsula
and a passage cleared through the Dardanelles there would be a long
and weary struggle, in which progress would be as slow and beset by as
many obstacles as it was on the Western front. Russia was to obtain no
relief that way; as a counter-offensive to the German campaign of
1915, the attack on the Dardanelles had failed; and the failure
produced a deeper impression upon the Balkans than if the attempt had
never been made. The way was clear for the next move of German
diplomacy and war.