XIV.1 In the West
As soon as the best season of the year began, we awaited the opening of the expected general enemy offensive with the greatest anxiety. We had made strategic preparations to meet it by regrouping our armies, but in the course of the winter we had also taken tactical measures to deal with what would in any case be the greatest of all the efforts of our enemies.
Not the least important of these measures were the changes we introduced into our previous system of defense. They were based on our experiences in the earlier battles. In future our defensive positions were no longer to consist of single lines and strong points but of a network of lines and groups of strong points. In the deep zones thus formed we did not intend to dispose our troops on a rigid and continuous front but in a complex system of nuclei and distributed in breadth and depth. The defender had to keep his forces mobile to avoid the destructive effects of the enemy fire during the period of artillery preparation, as well as voluntarily to abandon any parts of the line which could no longer be held, and then to recover by a counterattack all the points which were essential to the maintenance of the whole position. These principles applied in detail as in general.
We thus met the devastating effects of the enemy artillery and trench mortar fire and their surprise infantry attacks with more and more deeply distributed defensive lines and the mobility of our forces. At the same time we developed the principle of saving men in the forward lines by increasing the number of our machine guns and so economizing troops.
So far-reaching a change in our defensive system undoubtedly involved an element of risk. This element lay primarily in the fact that in the very middle of the war we demanded a break with tactical practices and experiences with which our subordinate commanders and the men had become familiar, and to which many of them naturally ascribed some particular virtue. A change from one tactical method to another provoked a mild crisis even in peacetime. On the one hand it involved a certain amount of exaggeration of the new features, and on the other a very stubborn adhesion to the old. Even the most carefully worded instructions left room for misunderstandings. Voluntary interpreters had the time of their lives, and the force of inertia in human thought and action was frequently not to be overcome without a tremendous effort.
But it was not for these reasons only that our tactical innovations were a risky step. It was much more difficult to give ourselves an affirmative answer to the question whether, in the middle of war, our army, constituted as it was now, was in a position to adopt the new measures and translate them into the reality of the battlefield.
We could be in no doubt that the military machine with which we were now working was not to be compared with those of 1914 and 1915, or indeed with that of the opening months of 1916. A vast number of our most splendid fighting men had been buried in our cemeteries or sent home with shattered limbs or diseased bodies. It is true that we still had a proud nucleus of our 1914 men, and around them had gathered a mass of young and enthusiastic newcomers prepared for any sacrifice. But an army requires more than that — bodily strength and resolution have to be trained and taught by experience. An army with the moral and intellectual powers and the great traditions of the German Army of 1914 retains its intrinsic worth for many years in war, so long as it receives physical and moral reinforcement from the Homeland. But its general average sinks, and indeed, in the natural course of things is bound to sink, even though its value compared with that of the enemy, who has been just as long in the field, remains relatively at the old level.
Our new defensive system made heavy demands on the moral resolution and capacity of the troops because it abandoned the firm external rigidity of the serried lines of defense, and thereby made the independent action, even of the smallest bodies of troops, the supreme consideration. Tactical cooperation was no longer obtained by defenses that were continuous to the eye, but consisted of the invisible moral bond between the men engaged in such tactical cooperation. It is no exaggeration to say that in these circumstances the adoption of the new principles was the greatest evidence of the confidence which we placed in the moral and mental powers of our army, down to its smallest unit. The immediate future was to prove whether that confidence was misplaced.
The first storm in the West broke just after the beginning of spring. On April 9th the English attack at Arras gave the signal for the opening of the enemy's great spring offensive. The attack was prepared for days with the whole fury of masses of enemy artillery and trench mortars. There was nothing of the surprise tactics which Nivelle had employed in the October of the previous year. Did not the English believe in these tactics, or did they feel themselves too inexperienced to adopt them? For the moment the reason was immaterial. The fact alone was sufficient and spoke a fearful language. The English attack swept over our first, second, and third lines. Groups of strong points were overwhelmed or silenced after a heroic resistance. Masses of artillery were lost. Our defensive system had apparently failed!
A serious crisis now supervened, one of those situations in which everything appears to be beyond control. "Crises must be avoided," says the layman. The only reply the soldier can make is this: "Then we had better keep out of war from the start, for crises are inevitable." They are of the very nature of war and distinguish it as the domain of peril and the unknown. The art of war is to overcome crises, not to avoid them. He who recoils from the menace of a crisis is binding his own arms, becomes a plaything in the hands of a bolder adversary, and soon goes in a crisis to destruction.
I do not mean to suggest that the crisis on April 9th could not have been avoided after all the preparations which we had been in a position to make. It is certain that we should not have had a crisis on such a scale if we had replied to the enemy breakthrough with a prompt counterattack with reserves brought up for the purpose. Of course, after such infernal artillery preparation as preceded this attack, serious local disasters were only to be expected.
The evening report of this April 9th revealed rather a dark picture. Many shadows — little light. In such cases more light must be sought. A ray appeared, though a tiny flickering ray. The English did not seem to have known how to exploit the success they had gained to the full. This was a piece of luck for us, as so often before. After the report I pressed the hand of my First Quartermaster-General with the words: "We have lived through more critical times than today together." Today! It was his birthday! My confidence was unshaken. I knew that reinforcements were marching to the battlefield and that trains were hastening that way. The crisis was over. Within me it was certainly over. But the battle raged on.
Another battle picture. After the first weeks of April the French guns were thundering at Soissons, and from there far away eastwards to the neighborhood of Rheims. Hundreds of hostile trench mortars were scattering death. Here Nivelle commanded, the reward of the fame he had won at Verdun. Apparently he, too, had not drawn the inferences we expected from his recent experiences at Verdun. The French artillery raged for days, nay weeks. Our defensive zone was to be converted into a waste of rubble and corpses. All that was lucky enough to escape physical destruction was at any rate to be morally broken. There seemed little doubt that such a consummation would be attained in this fearful conflagration. At length Nivelle supposed our troops to be annihilated, or at any rate sufficiently cowed. On April 16th he sent forward his battalions, pretty confident of victory. Or perhaps it would be better to say that he commissioned his men to gather in the fruits which had ripened in the tropical heat! Then the incredible happened. From the shattered trenches and shell holes rose German manhood, possessed of German strength and resolution, and scattered death and desolation among the advancing ranks and the masses behind them which were already flinching under the storm of our artillery fire and tending to herd together. The German resistance might be overcome at the points where destruction had been fiercest, but in this battle of giants what did the loss of small sectors mean compared with the triumphant resistance of the whole front?
In the very first day it was clear that the French had suffered a downright defeat. The bloody reverse proved the bitterest, indeed the most overwhelming disappointment to the French leaders and their men.
The battles of Arras, Soissons, and Rheims raged on for weeks. It revealed only one tactical variation from the conflict on the Somme in the previous year, a variation I must not forget to mention. After the first few days our adversaries won not a single success worth mentioning, and after a few weeks they sank back exhausted on the battlefield and resumed trench warfare. So our defense measures had proved themselves brilliantly, after all.
Now for a third picture. The scene was changed to the heights of Wytschaete and Messines, northwest of Lille and opposite Kemmel Hill. It was June 7th, a moment at which the failure of the battles I have just mentioned was already obvious. The position on the Wytschaete hills, the key to the salient at that point, was very unfavorable for a modern defense. The comparatively restricted back area did not permit the employment of a sufficiently deep defensive zone. Our forward trenches lay on the western slope and were a magnificent target for hostile artillery. The wet soil sank in summer and winter; below, ground were mines innumerable, for this method of warfare had been employed earlier on in extremely bitter fighting for the possession of the most important points. Yet it was long since any sounds of underground burrowing had been heard. Our trenches on the heights of St. Eloi as well as at the cornerstone of Wytschaete and Messines were exposed to hostile artillery fire not only from the west but from north and south as well.
The English prepared their attack in the usual way. The defenders suffered heavily, more heavily than ever before. Our anxious question whether it would not be better voluntarily to evacuate the heights had received the manly answer: "We shall hold, so we will stand fast." But when the fateful June 7th dawned the ground rose from beneath the feet of the defenders, their most vital strongpoints collapsed, and through the smoke and falling debris of the mines the English storm troops pressed forward over the last remnants of the German defense. Violent attempts on our part to restore the situation by counterattacks failed under the murderous, hostile artillery fire which from all sides converted the back area of the lost position into a veritable inferno. Nevertheless, we again succeeded in bringing the enemy to a halt before he had effected a complete breach in our lines. Our losses in men and war material were heavy. It would have been better to have evacuated the ground voluntarily.
In my judgement the general result of the great enemy offensive in the West had not been unsatisfactory hitherto. We had never been defeated. Even our worst perils had been surmounted. Though gaining a good deal of ground, our enemies had never succeeded in reaching more distant goals, much less in passing from the breakthrough battle to open warfare. Once more we were to exploit our successes in the West on other fronts.
XIV.2 In the Near and Far East
Even before the wild dance had begun on our Western Front, Sarrail had renewed his attacks in Macedonia with his center of gravity at Monastir. These events, too, commanded our full attention. Once more our enemy had far-reaching objectives. Simultaneously with this onslaught on the Bulgarian front, our enemy had instigated a rising in Serbia with a view to menacing our communications with the Balkan peninsula. The rising was suppressed at its critical point, Nish, before it had extended over the whole of Old Serbia, an eventuality which was much feared by government circles in Bulgaria. The fighting on the Macedonian front was marked by great bitterness, but the Bulgarian Army succeeded in maintaining its position practically intact without our having to send further German reinforcements. A very satisfactory result for us! Our allies had fought very well. They had plainly realized that the work we had done in their ranks had been brilliantly justified. I felt convinced that the Bulgarian Army would remain equal to its task in future, and this opinion was confirmed when the Entente renewed their attacks in May. Once more their onslaught along the whole front from Monastir to Lake Doiran was an utter failure.
The front on the Armenian plateau had remained inactive. Occasional small raids during the winter seemed to be inspired far more by anxiety to secure booty than by any revival of the offensive spirit on either side. Under the influence of their great supply difficulties, the Russians had withdrawn the bulk of their troops from the wildest and most desolate parts of the mountains to more fertile districts in the interior. The complete pause in the Russian activity was certainly surprising. The Turks sent us no news which could in any way explain it.
On the Irak front the English attacked in February, and were in possession of Bagdad by March 11th. They owed this success to their skillful envelopment of the strong Turkish positions.
In Southern Palestine the English attacked at Gaza in great superiority, but purely frontally and with little tactical skill. Their onslaught collapsed completely in front of the Turkish lines. It was only the failure of a Turkish column which had been sent out to envelop their wing that saved the English from utter defeat.
I shall have to deal later with the effect of these events in Asia on our general military situation.
XIV.3 On the Eastern Front
Even before the French and English opened their general offensive in the West the foundations of the Russian front were already trembling. Under our mighty blows the framework of the Russian State had begun to go to pieces.
Hitherto the unwieldy Russian Colossus had hung over the whole European and Asiatic world like a nightmare. The interior of the mass now began to swell and stretch. Great cracks appeared on its surface, and through the gaps we soon had glimpses of the fires of political passion and the workings of infernal primitive forces. Tsardom was tottering! Would some new power arise which could extinguish those passions in the icy prisons of Siberia, and suffocate those powers of barbarism in living graves?
Russia in revolution! How often had men with a real or pretended knowledge of the country announced that this event was at hand? I had ceased to believe in it. Now that it had materialized, it aroused in me no feeling of political satisfaction, but rather a sense of military relief. But even the latter was slow in coming. I asked myself whether the fall of the Tsar was a victory of the peace or the war party. Had the gravediggers of Tsardom only worked in order to bring to nought, with the last crowned head, the well-known anxiety for peace of Russian upper circles and the peace longings of great masses of the people?
So long as the behavior of the Russian Army provided no clear answer to this question our situation with regard to Russia was, and remained, indefinite. The process of disintegration had undoubtedly begun in the Russian State. If a dictatorship, with powers to be employed as ruthlessly as those which had just been overthrown, did not arise, this process would continue, though perhaps slower than normally in the mighty and ponderous Russian Colossus with its unwieldy movements. From the outset our plan was to leave this process alone. We must, however, take care that it left us alone, and did not perhaps destroy us too. In a situation like this we should remember the lesson of the cannonade of Valmy, which more than a hundred years before had welded together again the cracked and broken structure of French national power and started that great blood-red flood which swept over all Europe. Of course Russia of 1917 no longer had at her disposal the immense untapped sources of manpower which France then had. The Tsar's best and finest men were at the front, or lay in graves innumerable before and behind our lines.
For me personally to wait quietly while the process of Russian disintegration developed was a great sacrifice. If for political reasons I was not allowed to consider an offensive in the East, all my soldierly feelings urged me towards an attack in the West. Could any notion be more obvious than that of bringing all our effective fighting troops from the East to the West and then taking the offensive? I was thinking of the failure of the English attack at Arras and the severe defeat of France between Soissons and Rheims. America was still far away. If she came after the strength of France was broken, she would come too late!
However, the Entente too recognized the peril with which they were menaced, and worked with all their might to prevent the collapse of Russian power, and with it the great relief that collapse would mean to our Eastern Front. Russia must remain in the war, at least until the new armies of America were on French soil. Otherwise the military and moral defeat of France was certain. For this reason the Entente sent politicians, agitators, and officers to Russia in the hope of bolstering up the shattered Russian front. Nor did these missions forget to take money with them, for in many parts of Russia money is more effective than political argument.
Once more we were robbed of the brightest prospect of victory by these countermeasures. The Russian front was kept in being, not through its own strength, but mainly through the work of the agitators whom our enemies sent there, and who achieved their purpose, even against the will of the Russian masses.
Ought we not to have attacked when the first cracks of the Russian edifice began to be revealed? May it not be that political considerations robbed us of the finest fruits of all our great victories?
Our relations to the Russian Army on the Eastern Front at first took the form of an ever more obvious approach to an armistice, although there was nothing in writing. By degrees the Russian infantry everywhere declared that they would fight no more. Yet with the apathy of the masses they remained in their trenches. If the relations between the two sides led to too obviously amicable an intercourse, the Russian artillery intervened every now and then. This arm of the service was still in the hands of its leaders, not out of any natural conservative instinct, but because it counted fewer independent heads than its sister arm. The agitators of the Entente and the officers still had great influence with the Russian batteries. It was true that the Russian infantry grumbled about the way in which this long-desired armistice was thus disturbed, and indeed occasionally turned on their artillery sister and openly rejoiced when our shells fell among the gunpits. But the general situation I have described remained unchanged for months.
The Russian disinclination to fight was most patent on the northern wing. From there it extended to the south. The Rumanians were apparently unaffected by it. After May it appeared that the commanders had got the reins in their hands again, even in the north. Friendly relations between the two trench lines gradually stopped. There was a return to the old method of intercourse, weapon in hand. Before long there was no doubt that in the areas behind the Russian front the work of discipline was being carried on at top pressure. In this way parts, at any rate, of the Russian Army were once more made capable of resistance, and indeed capable of attack. The war current had set strongly, and Russia advanced to a great offensive under Kerensky.
Kerensky, not Brussiloff? The latter had been swept from his high post by the streams of blood of his own countrymen which had flowed in Galicia and Wolhynia in 1916, just as Nivelle had been swept away in France in the spring of this year. Even in Russia, with her immense resources in manpower, the authorities seemed to have become sensitive about sacrifices in mass. In the great war ledger the page on which the Russian losses wore written has been torn out. No one knows the figures. Five or eight millions? We, too, have no idea. All we know is that sometimes in our battles with the Russians we had to remove the mounds of enemy corpses from before our trenches in order to get a clear field of fire against fresh assaulting waves. Imagination may try to reconstruct the figure of their losses, but an accurate calculation will remain for ever a vain thing.
It was difficult to say whether Kerensky adopted the idea of an offensive of his own free will, or was induced or compelled to do so by the Entente. In either case it was entirely to the interest of the Entente that Russia should be driven into an offensive once more. In the West they had already offered up in vain a good half of their best fighting troops, perhaps more than half. What other alternative had they but to send in what they had left, as American help was still far away? It was in these very months that the U-boat warfare was encroaching on the margin of existence of our bitterest and most irreconcilable foe to such a degree that it appeared questionable whether shipping would be available for the American reinforcements in the coming year. German troops must therefore be held down fast in the East, and for that reason Kerensky must send Russia's last armies to the attack. It was a venturesome game, and for Russia most venturesome of all! Yet the calculation on which it was based was an accurate one, for if the game succeeded, not only would the Entente be saved, but a dictatorship in Russia could be created and maintained. Without such a dictatorship Russia would lapse into chaos.
It must be admitted that the prospects of Kerensky's offensive against the German front were hardly more inviting than on previous occasions. Good German divisions might have been sent to the West, but those that were left were sound enough to hold up a Russian onslaught. Our enemy had not the inward resolution to turn his attack into the long drawn out storms of 1917. A large number of Russian apostles of freedom were roving the back areas of the army for loot, or streaming homewards. Even good elements were leaving the front, inspired by anxiety for their relatives and possessions in view of the internal catastrophe which was threatening. But, on the other hand, the situation on the Austro-Hungarian front gave cause for anxiety. It was to be feared that once more, as in 1916, the Russian onslaught would find weak spots. In the spring of this year a representative of our ally had given us a very grave description of the state of things on this part of the front, and told us his general impression that "the great majority of the Austro-Slav troops would offer even less resistance to a Russian attack than they had in 1916." The fact was that the process of political disintegration was affecting them simultaneously with the Russian troops. The same authority gave us Kerensky's plan which had been told him by deserters. It was this: local attacks against the Germans in order to tie them down, while the main blow was dealt at the Austro-Hungarian wall. And that is exactly what happened.
The Russians attacked the German lines at Riga, Dvinsk, and Smorgon and were driven off. The wall in Galicia proved to be stone only where Austro-Hungarian troops were stiffened by German. On the other hand the Austro-Slav wall near Stanislau collapsed under Kerensky's simple tap. But Kerensky's troops were not like Brussiloff's. A year had passed since that last offensive — a year of heavy losses and deep demoralization for the Russian Army. So notwithstanding fairly favorable prospects, the Russian offensive did not get right through at Stanislau. The Russian grain was now ripe for reaping. The reaper too was ready. It was just the time at which the real harvest was beginning in the fields of our German Homeland. The middle of July!